Yahoo! Desktop Search

Yahoo! Desktop Search is an instant search application developed by Yahoo for users who desire to quickly locate email content, contacts, as well as documents, pictures and music based on custom filters.

The program was the result of a partnership that Yahoo made with X1 Discovery in an attempt to provide users with a versatile and speedy desktop client for content search. At the time, such endeavors had already been adopted by Google with their Google Desktop Search product and by Microsoft, who had issued MSN Toolbar Suite.

Obviously, Yahoo had to follow the trends and to challenge the competition through an even more appealing and versatile product, Yahoo! Desktop Search. The product was launched with a Beta label, which it didn’t manage to cross of the list in order to make it to a stable release, as development was ceased at some point.

Nonetheless, it is still a working product. It’s easy to setup and use and sports a quite friendly and intuitive interface organized in tabs. Each of the tabs correspond to a certain type of content, such as email, attachments, contacts, IM, documents, pictures and music.

For the first two, you are required to have Outlook installed, while for the IM search to work you need to have a working version of Yahoo! Messenger and to provide your Yahoo credentials at program startup.

Filters are made available for all tabs, therefore you will be able to search by name, file type, size and other criteria that are specific to the selected content. For instance, if you want to perform a search in the Email tab, you will be able to filter by recipient, subject, date/time and attachment. Results are displayed instantly, as you type.

If development had continued, Yahoo! Desktop Search could have reached a better level of popularity, but unfortunately, this is not the case. Despite the fact that all efforts towards this project have ceased, the program is still usable, even on modern operating systems.