SearchMax

Digital Hide-and-Seek
Desktop search can help you sort through your computer’s contents
By MARYANN MURRAY BUECHNER

If you’ve come to think of your computer as a digital version of the couch that swallowed your car keys–with photos, songs and travel plans all buried in hard-to-reach places–a new breed of software known as desktop search can help. The big names in Internet search–Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AOL–have released, or will release early this year, a desktop-search tool for consumers, making it as easy to search your PC’s hard drive as it is to search the Web. (Existing search tools built into Windows are too cumbersome to compare, says Dave Goebel, president of the search advisory firm Goebel Group.)

These free programs, typically just a few megabytes in size, are easy to download. Once installed, the software gets to work indexing files, a task that can take several hours and is done only when the machine is idle. From then on, you simply click on an icon or a toolbar to use it.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 3rd, 2005 at 10:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.