Google's foray into the desktop search market has this week hit its first competition, as rival offerings have been launched by both Microsoft and Ask Jeeves. Both of these companies are now giving users the chance to install their software onto their machines with the idea that finding various files on a users computer will now be a lot easier.
Both Microsoft's MSN Toolbar Suite and Ask Jeeves Desktop search are in beta format, and both offer a rather similar setup to the Google offering. They all rely on creating a fairly sizeable index on your PC, and then adding new items to this index whilst your computer is idle.
There are some differences between the searches however that may be of interest to users. The MSN Toolbar Suite for example allows users to search for MP3 files and PDF files, which neither of the other searches allow. It is also more configurable and can be set up to appear pretty much all over the place, from the users start bar to the top of an application window.
The Google Desktop search has not appeared to have improved a great deal since it was launched, possibly because Google have been waiting to see what their competitors were going to come up with. Now that there is a bit of competition in the market place it may be that they will roll out an updated copy. Right now Microsoft's search system is looking to be the strongest offering, but as all of these systems are in beta we expect that position to change in the near future.
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