Microsoft Desktop Search To Compete with Google
Google is doing a heck of a job! It led to market leaders (MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail) increase the web space on webmail with GMail even before it is launched. Now, they have forced Microsoft to step into the desktop searching market sooner than expected! If only they could provide some competition on the Operating System market…
Microsoft showcased a demo of their upcoming desktop search tool at a financial analysts’ conference in July. However, they did not give any idea of its release other than that it would be released before the launch of Longhorn. That launch is due for 2006! Now the latest news in is that Microsoft has promised that a beta version of this tool would be out before the year ends.
Last week saw the launch of Google’s version of their desktop search. Moreover, with competition heating up, we can only expect the services to go better. It would be interesting to compare the various tools that are coming up in the market. Yahoo! is also in the running for a similar tool that allows users to search for content on their own Hard Disks. These tools get more relevant as hard disk sizes are rising every year to such an extent that bare searching capabilities of the operating system are finding it hard to satisfy the users.
It is nice what competition can do to a market, which did not even existed mainstream sometime back. Only few relevant players were there like Filehand, X1 and dtSearch with few of them free for the end users.
Sushubh Mittal is technical consultant to SEJ and blogs at TechWhack.com
