Those of you who attended UKeiG's event on Desktop Search on June 14th
will not be surprised to learn that X1 (http://www.x1.com/) have
upstaged Yahoo Desktop and made their own product available free of
charge. You may recall that I commented on the lack of significant
updates in Yahoo's DS over the last 18 months, and that Martin White
passed on some industry gossip concerning the relationship between Yahoo
and X1 (Yahoo has licensed in X1's technology for its desktop search).
X1 are now offering X1 Enterprise Client (formerly X1 Desktop Search)
free of charge. If you have tried Yahoo DS then the X1 interface will
look very familiar, but there have been improvements in X1's. More file
formats are supported (a full list is at
http://www.x1.com/products/viewable_file_formats.html), it indexes Open
Document Format files, and Thunderbird email is now fully supported.
Thunderbird emails are previewed as separate messages in X1 whereas
Yahoo displays the whole of the inbox containing the relevant message.
I found, though, that X1 was highly selective in choosing which
Thunderbird inboxes and folders to index so it misses about 80% of my
emails. I cannot find any clues as to why this is happening and X1 does
appear to have finished indexing my PC's hard drive. Another negative
for me is that it does not index removable drives so the data on my 250
GB USB drive remains a mystery to X1. All of which means that I shall
not be changing my verdict of June the 14th: the top three desktop
search tools for me are still - in alphabetical order - Copernic,
Exalead and ISYS.
--
Karen Blakeman, UKeiG Management Committee
mailto:[log in to unmask]
t: +44 118 947 2256 f: +44 20 8020 0253 m: +44 7764 936733
88 Star Road, Caversham, Berkshire, RG4 5BE
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