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Whatever happened to Desktop Search?

Google released Google Desktop in 2005 and the web went abuzz with excitement. The Question That No One Had Asked had been answered: "Why does it take longer to search my hard drive than it does to search the web?"

Anyway, Microsoft and Yahoo! quickly responded with their own alternatives; Apple bundled Spotlight with the next OS X release. The Linux community was also working on Beagle. In the space of a year, having a desktop search product in your portfolio became a must (or else every startup that did have such a product would be ready to be crowned the Next You).

After that period there's been little innovation from a users' perspective. No one's heard anything at all about Yahoo's desktop search tool; Microsoft's been working on Windows Search tool without too much noise. And the last posts on the Google Desktop blog have been almost exclusively about one "featured gadget" after another for the sidebar.

It looks like it wasn't too hard a problem to solve after all. The technology for crawling and indexing large amounts of data, and then searching that index had existed for many years even in 2005, so building a desktop search tool wasn't so hard.

And beyond a point, Desktop Search isn't a very glamorous product either. It serves one single purpose – finding files (and content within files). And you can't make money off it (no really, try serving ads based on what you found deep in your users' folders).

Finally, today, it's all the rage to take your files from your desktop, put them online and share them. Email. Pictures. Videos. Documents. Playlists. The death of the desktop and the ascendancy of the "webtop" (or whatever) is in fact a favorite debate topic, since everyone's on the same side. Hardly the sort of time for desktop search to be in fashion. [1]

[1] Of course there's the Enterprise, where large amounts of data _are_ stored (and forgotten) on employees's computers, but there security an privacy concerns trump everything (A third party program is scanning all our employee's files! No wait, that's the anti-virus, so that's OK).


August 17, 2009 ·  Post to Twitter ·  Email this ·  Uncategorized ·  Leave a Comment


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