Franck Poisson, Director of Web Sales and Business Development, Exalead will be joining the desktop search panel debate on Tuesday 29 November, 11.15-12.45.  Exalead have recently released their desktop search product, which has been designed to simplify all aspects of information search and retrieval for organizations of all sizes.

Many thanks to those of you who commented on my earlier posting about desktop search and to those of you who emailed me privately. Your feedback is very helpful. A couple of people have asked me to explain what desktop search does. Put very simply, it searches for information and files on your desktop PC. You download a program to your machine, tell it what to index and set it going. The first time it runs, it does take a while to index your files. These may include cached web pages, word documents, emails, audio, video, IM, PDF etc. depending on the desktop search you choose and the settings you stipulate. Some programs combine desktop with web search.

The types of files indexed by these programs varies and, for those of us using non-Microsoft programs, support for applications such as Open Office/Star Office, Thunderbird and Firefox is an important factor.  But there are other criteria and features and I shall be covering some of these in my presentation.

So why not use the built in Windows Search for files and folders? First of all, you must make sure that is set up correctly. In some versions of  Windows, the Search option appears "broken" because of the default settings. For details and instructions on how to fix it see "Making Windows XP Search do what it says on the tin - almost" in the December 2004 issue of my newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. (Note: this is nearly a year old so some of the comments at the end of the article are no longer valid.) The second problem is that if you have disabled the "Indexing Service" it takes an age to find file names containing your terms and an eternity to search the text within files. And it does not search inside files that have extensions that Windows does not recognise as being associated with text applications. It will be interesting to see what Search can do in Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system.

Do I use desktop search on a regular basis? Erm, I have to confess I do not. Yes, I do have desktop search on my PCs but my documents and emails are organized into folders and sub-folders so it is rare that I "lose" a file. I do, though, sometimes forget where I have saved a file, and there are times when I want  to track down the different versions of a document or I have forgotten whether I really did get around to downloading that really interesting PDF newsletter. For me, desktop search is not  essential but it is a useful utility which does save me time on certain occasions.