January 6, 2006

Yahoo Go Puts Yahoo Services Into Cell Phones, TV & PCs

Yahoo has launched Yahoo Go (link via PaidContent), a suite of products designed to let people reach information whether they're on their PCs, phones or using TV. The suite will be formally announced by Yahoo CEO Terry Semel at CES keynote today

Yahoo Go Mobile currently works only for Nokia Series 60 phones. It will allow you to sync your contacts, photos and mail with Yahoo. Yahoo says that in the near future, Yahoo Go Mobile will be preinstalled on the Nokia 6682 from Cingular Wireless. Beyond Yahoo Go Mobile, plain old Yahoo Mobile has a wide range of services, some of which involve no special software at all.

Yahoo Go TV is a coming application for Windows XP machines that allows you to see photo slide shows, listen to internet radio stations, search for movie info and clips and find video from the web. What's the TV part, then? It will work with a PC-enabled TV, News.com reports. Or, I suspect, a PC that displays TV in addition to a PC desktop, such as the Windows Media Center does. This application looks to tap into existing Yahoo products but perhaps make them easier for users to be aware of through a more customized software interface.

Yahoo Go Desktop / PC is another coming application that looks incredibly similar to the Google Sidebar. It allows you to apparently tap into and sync more easily with existing Yahoo services such as Flickr photo sharing, blogging on Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Mail. A new "social browser" is also promised, though this seems to be the sidebar or dashboard-like application I mentioned. From various reports, Yahoo Go Dashboard appears to be the name of this.

Yahoo To Launch Go Initiative; Mobile, Connected TVs & Desktop Access over at PaidContent has a nice summary, and v ia Russell Beattie, a number of articles have some additional details.

Yahoo goes mobile over at News.com says Yahoo Go Mobile will work in 10 different countries (I suspect this actually means it will work with 10 different Yahoo country specific editions, such as Yahoo US versus Yahoo UK). Yahoo Go TV is promised for download before April and remote recording of TV shows is planned.

Yahoo Launches Content Service for Phones from the AP covers Yahoo working with Motorola to bring Yahoo Go into its phones, though Google still looks to be the preferred search provider for Motorola, given its deal announced today.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 9:33 AM | Permalink

January 4, 2006

PC World Talks Web Mail Betas and Desktop Search

An article in the the January 2006 issue of PC World offers a brief look at web mail betas from Yahoo (I use it all of the time, kudos), MSN Live Mail, and Zimbra. The Yahoo and MSN services are invite only betas at the moment.

Yahoo Mail's search shines, reaching into attachments as well as e-mail messages, and showing the document snippet where the search term was found. Yahoo Mail also interacts logically with your browser's back button--often a trouble spot for Ajax apps that continually update one "page" in the browser. In contrast, Gmail disables the back button, while Zimbra warns you that using it will log you out.

Microsoft's Windows Live Mail, which feels more like a tweak to Hotmail than a total rethinking of Web mail...

...Zimbra's real strength is as a full-fledged communication server, allowing a company to integrate its databases so users can, say, jump from a message with an order number to the order database itself.

The Open Source Version of Zimbra is available as a free download while a Network Edition priced at $28 per mailbox per year

And now to desktop search...

What a difference a year makes. It was just a year ago when we were in the midst of desktop search wars. Well, that was a year ago and this month the topic gets little press. A PC World article by Stephen Manes: Desktop Search: Just What You Need, looks at the power of what desktop search can offer the end user. He says that Yahoo Desktop Search is his favorite but adds that if YDS doesn't work for you to try one of the many other free desktop search tools available.

Posted by Gary Price at 11:44 AM | Permalink

September 28, 2005

Yahoo Desktop Search Out Of Beta, Gets LiveWords Contextual Search

Desktop Search Goes Live! at the Yahoo Search Blog covers how a new LiveWords button has been added to Yahoo Desktop Search as part of that product coming out of beta. Select a chunk of text, and then LiveWords automatically tries to find matches related to the context of that search.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:14 AM | Permalink

July 12, 2005

Update for Yahoo Desktop Search Now Available, Thunderbird Support Added

This afternoon Yahoo posted word that they've released an update for their desktop search tool. You'll now find support for Thunderbird e-mail along with what Yahoo calls a "simplified" user interface.

The initial download of YDS has also been made smaller and faster by "splitting out support for less common file types" and placing them into an "expansion pack" that's available here. Overall, Yahoo can index and search more than 300 file formats.

More info via the Yahoo Search Blog. Yahoo's own Jeremy Zawodny has posted some comments.

Posted by Gary Price at 6:13 PM | Permalink

March 23, 2005

Yahoo Desktop Search Adds New Search Options

Some desktop search news to let you know about.

Word that Yahoo has just added a couple of new search options to their Yahoo Desktop Search (YDS) application. Along with the more than 200 indexable/searchable file types that are already part of YDS are two new indexing options. YDS can now index your Yahoo Messenger archives and your Yahoo Address Book contacts.

YDS can be downloaded for free here. For more about Yahoo Desktop Search, here's a link to Chris's SearchDay review from earlier this year.

Posted by Gary Price at 12:06 AM | Permalink

February 14, 2005

Yahoo Desktop Search for the Enterprise?

Desktop search tools to move from desktop to Intranet, is the title of a ZDNet article that includes comments from Peter Crowe, head of search at Yahoo Australia and New Zealand, about possibly offering an enterprise version of their desktop search application.

It is not hard to imagine the timesaving that will be available -- especially in larger organisations -- as people find their information more quickly. If that information is not being indexed and available for query then clearly you are not seeing the full picture. That is where a lot of people are heading -- it is clear that there is a great opportunity to provide a service with that type of execution," said Crowe.

Verity recently announced a partnership with Yahoo to include web search results (and sponsored links) when a searcher runs an enterprise search using Verity software. This is also another example of federated search. In other words, keeping materials in disparate databases and merging them together at the time of the search.

It's also worth mentioning that desktop search at the enterprise level was available long before desktop search wars broke out in 2004. X1, the technology that Yahoo Desktop Search uses, already offers an enterprise version. Coveo, dtsearch and many others also offer this type of technology.

Posted by Gary Price at 10:37 AM | Permalink

January 11, 2005

A Few Thoughts About Yahoo Desktop Search

As Chris wrote about for SearchDay, Yahoo has just released their desktop search app. I've had a chance to use the latest entry in the desktop search wars and have a few random comments and constructive critcisims to share based on a version of YDS that the company shared with me last week. Let's remember that today's release is a "living" beta. (-:

+ I'm surprised that with Yahoo! doing so much work with syndicated feeds that they didn't what to differentiate their product (important these days) from the outset with the ability to aggregate and keyword search feeds. In other words, toss an RSS aggregator into the app.

+ Partial words show up in results when they shouldn't be there. For example, when I search my hard drive for "Chris Sherman" AND "News", YDS considers "news" in "newsletter" a hit. Searching for shop (without "") shows pages containing the word "shopping" as hits. Searching for the name "Don" (with quotation marks) shows "don't" and "done" as hits.

+ It would be useful if future releases would allow you to view and if needed, rerun previous searches via a pull-down option below the search box. Interestingly, previous queries are visible when searching from the deskbar (yes, Yahoo! search offers a deskbar) but not from the app itself.

+ PDF gripe. With other desktop search apps you can quickly view the preview version of a PDF and then cut and paste the text (in ASCII) into a document. This is not possible with YDS. However, you can cut and paste other document types.

+ The YDS download is larger than similar apps coming in at about seven MB. Google Desktop Search is less than 1MB and Copernic's tool is about 2MB. The Jeeves app is also a very small download.

+ A feature to remove not have certain directories and filetypes (YDS indexes an impressive 200+ file types) indexed is available but it needs to be more visible under the options header. It would also be helpful, IMHO, if you were asked what you want and don't want indexed when you first install the product.

+ Eudora and Netscape Mail users stay tuned. At the moment YDS doesn't allow you to search mail if you use these mail apps. The native X1 app does offer this capability. I'm betting Yahoo! has plans to adds these options soon.

+ A link to search the Yahoo web database is included in the YDS app. However, it opens opens a web browser window and does not integrate results into the preview pane. Better desktop/web search integration would make help the searcher save time when simply reviewing result lists.

+ Fast Fact: When searching with Boolean connectors AND, OR, and NOT need to be in upper case, otherwise they're considered search terms. Overall, Yahoo Desktop offers many advanced search features.

+ I agree with Chris, it would be useful if YDS would offer an option to index and make searchable a permanent cache of every page that is viewed in your browser.

Posted by Gary Price at 8:10 AM | Permalink

January 10, 2005

Yahoo Weighs in with Desktop Search

Long anticipated, Yahoo finally released its desktop search application a few moments ago. Overall, I'm impressed with the product, even though it's little more than a Yahoo-skinned version of the X1 desktop search tool, at least at this point.

Upsides: Powerful search capability, supporting more than 200 file formats. Excellent filtering capability, allowing you to quickly pinpoint desired files. And a killer preview function which displays documents and even queues up multimedia files in Windows media player.

Downsides: Virtually no web search integration, and no indexing or caching of web pages viewed—one of Google Desktop's strongest features. But Yahoo calls this a "living beta" and says that will change soon. Read on for more in today's SearchDay article, Yahoo Launches Desktop Search.

Posted by Chris Sherman at 11:59 PM | Permalink

December 10, 2004

Yahoo Details Desktop Search Plans; Ask Jeeves & MSN Launch This Month

Yahoo has announced that it will release a desktop search product after the New Year, putting the search engine firmly in the desktop search race that Google kicked off earlier this year and that other major search engines have already declared that they'd be entering as well.

Ask Jeeves, Microsoft's MSN and AOL have all confirmed to date that they will launch desktop search applications, leaving Yahoo as the only major service remaining only in "rumor" status. That's now ended.

Yahoo's Plan

Yahoo plans to release a licensed version of X1, a powerful but relatively expensive tool that was recently rated well by CNET. Unlike X1, Yahoo's version will be offered free to consumers. Yahoo also promises integration with Yahoo's web search and other vertical search properties, an integration that will grow over the coming year, as the tool matures.

How exactly that integration will happen remains to be seen. The tool is only now going into non-public beta test, and I haven't yet gotten a copy to play with. We'll report more when that becomes available.

Yahoo did say that it plans for any integration to prevent leakage of desktop search queries from getting back to Yahoo itself. This has been an issue for some with Google's service.

For the most part, Google will have no idea of what someone's searching for on their own computer. However, in some instances where people go from web to desktop results or vice versa, Google could tell that a particular query term has what I call "desktop intent." Yahoo tells me that its tool will eliminate this entirely.

File Types & Interface Issues

Yahoo also touts that its tool will index many more file types than Google's. It's true that Google's tool is restricted compared to existing tools out there, such as X1 or Copernic, in terms of file coverage. But for many, what Google currently covers may be enough -- and it's an incredibly easy tool to download and install.

At only 450K, grabbing the Google application for use takes no more bandwidth than reading a few web pages. In contrast, the current X1 tool is a 6.3MB download. Yahoo's version may be lighter, which would help in reaching out to the broadband-challenged.

Personally, I've also found Google's application-less interface to be very compelling. Unlike other desktop search programs, Google Desktop doesn't require that you go into a particular program to do your search. Instead, you use a web page that looks just like the Google home page, and you get back results that look just like ordinary Google web results. The format is easy to understand and user-friendly.

The downside is Google doesn't provide some of the sorting and refinement options that rival tools offer. Yahoo hopes that will be another reason that consumers seek out its tool.

Yahoo's tool will also offer taskbar searching. This means that you can search using a box on the Windows taskbar. That would be helpful, given that I currently find it incredibly inconvenient that if I don't have a browser open, I've got to take an extra step to start searching with Google Desktop.

I've asked Google if there are plans to add a "Desktop" search option to its popular Google Toolbar or Google Deskbar. The response was the standard "no plans to announce but it's something we'd consider" line. Well, start considering soon! FYI, there is a workaround on this for Google Deskbar users.

Release Dates

Yahoo tells me its tool will go out to the public in early January. That's going to put it behind Ask Jeeves, which launches its own tool next week on December 15. MSN will also be out with its own tool by the end of the year. I'm working with a beta release of that right now but can't comment more beyond that. Instead, here's the latest statement the company is issuing on the subject:

"We have publicly stated that it is our intention to release a beta of our new desktop search technology by the end of the calendar year in the US and our timeline is driven by the quality of the service - we will launch MSN desktop search when we feel that the service has met the quality bar our consumers expect and deserve," said Justin Osmer, MSN product manager.

And AOL? The company plans its own desktop search application that is packaged as part of the new AOL browser that's in beta testing. Any AOL member can access this by signing into AOL, then using the keyword "beta" to reach the beta download area. I've just downloaded the beta but haven't had a chance to play with it. But the desktop search is powered by Copernic, another well regarded desktop search app. It was CNET's editor's choice in a recent review of desktop search apps. (Google Desktop was unrated in that review because it was too new but drew plenty of praise).

And so the timeline recap:

October 14: Google Desktop released
December 15: Ask Jeeves desktop search due for release
December 31: MSN desktop search due for release by this date or earlier
January 31: Yahoo desktop search due for release by this date or earlier
Sometime In 2005: AOL's combined browser and desktop search should be out at some point

Desktop Search Winner? Searchers!

Will Google having been first give it a key advantage over rivals? Honestly, who knows? We know that over half-a-million people downloaded it in the first two weeks according to Majestic Research. The downloads since almost certainly have exceeded a million if not more, though the actual installed user base is unknown.

As said, the tool is light to download, easy to use and useful enough for many people. In addition, I'd consider it a key search memory feature for Google, which otherwise lacks this type of personalization that most of its rivals offer. More on this in my review of the tool: Google Desktop Search Launched.

On the flipside, the more powerful features some of the rival tools offer, combined with the distribution through major search sites, will certainly grab other users. Those wanting to do MP3, photo or PDF searching, for example, need something other than Google Desktop -- at least unless Google begins to upgrade its beta product.

So who will win the hearts-and-minds of desktop searchers remains to be seen. Chances are, everyone's going to get a share. But the real winners are the desktop searchers themselves. We started 2004 with only a few fee-based desktop search tools. We're going to end with a great selection of free ones, finally -- and long-overdue -- making it easy for anyone to find material on their own computers as they can in searching the entire web.

For more on desktop search, see our Desktop Search category. It lists all stories previously we've previously blogged on the topic. It's available to Search Engine Watch members.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 2:20 AM | Permalink

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