Ask Jeeves acquired search startup Tukaroo earlier this year and promised a desktop search product by the end of the year. That promise has been realized with the December 15 release of Ask Jeeves Desktop Search Beta 1.7.0. It will compete with forthcoming products from Google and MSN, which both have desktop search products in beta, and Yahoo!, which has partnered with X1 Search and is expected to announce a similar product shortly. The competition makes perfect sense in terms of brand loyalty. If you don't like the results of a Google search, you can quickly try Ask Jeeves. But once you've invested the time and disk space for the index of a desktop search product, you can't easily switch.

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search indexes the content of Microsoft Office documents, text files, and rich text documents, but not PDF files. For other file types, it indexes the filename and any available metadata, such as artist and title information in MP3s. It indexes e-mail messages in Microsoft Outlook 2000 or later, but not attachments. By comparison, X1 indexes attachments and contacts, and MSN Deskbar indexes those and appointments and tasks. Ask Jeeves DS is expected to add support for indexing PDF content and to expand its support for Outlook before the product's formal release. Unlike X1, it will not index files stored within ZIP archives.

By default, AJDS initially indexes just e-mail, the desktop, and My Documents, using Gradual indexing, a mode that doesn't tax the CPU. We chose to index e-mail plus all files and to use Fast Indexing. With Fast Indexing active, the jeeves.exe process used between 50% and 90% of the system's CPU power and noticeably slowed other activity. If you need full system power for another task a simple click can set it to Gradual mode or back to Fast. On one test system, the full indexing process took just over two hours and generated about 90MB of index files—more or less in line with the competition. Indexing progress is displayed in tenths of a percent, but it was slightly misleading. It reached 90% in 20 minutes and took the remainder of the time to manage that last 10%. As with similar products, once the initial index is complete it stays up to date automatically.

AJDS is a standalone utility, more like X1 than like Google Desktop or the MSN Toolbar Suite, though it doesn't duplicate X1's "search as you type" feature. Launch it by double-clicking on its tray icon, type one or more search terms, and click on one of three buttons, Computer, Email, or Web. The search is very fast and returns all results in a single list, with a convenient preview of the selected item in a pane to the right of the list. Text documents and e-mails are displayed in full; images appear reduced in size if necessary, but bigger than thumbnails. AJDS will even preview audio and video files. However, preview of Excel files is apparently not available at this time. X1 offers a preview as well, and supports more file types; Google and MSN have no preview feature.

AJDS automatically organizes found files into eight category-specific tabs such as My Documents, Pictures, and Office Documents. Each tab shows the number of items it contains; the All tab naturally lists all found items. You can sort the results by file type, name, or date/time. In the same way, it organizes the results of an e-mail search in tabs by location (Inbox, Sent Items, or Other Folder) and by where the search term was found (To, From, Subject, or Body). The results page shows the sender, subject, folder, recipient, and date, and you can sort on any of these. Folder names may not display properly if they are too long.

Clicking on the Web button naturally launches a search using the latest version of Ask Jeeves, introduced this fall. This includes access to the MyJeeves saved-search feature. However, results appear within AJDS, not in your browser. You can search the entire Web or click on tabs labeled Pictures, News, Products (powered by PriceGrabber), or MyJeeves to fine-tune the search. And if you'd rather have the full power of your browser, you can just click on the "Launch in Browser" button.

AJDS doesn't force toolbars into your browser, e-mail client, or taskbar, but it does integrate with Windows in one very handy way. When you choose File | Open from most programs, an AJDS bar will appear above the standard file open dialog. You can enter a keyword and click on Search My Computer to locate the desired file quickly.

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is a friendly, speedy, standalone file, e-mail, and Web search utility with a convenient built-in preview for local items. It doesn't index PDF content or anything in Outlook other than messages, and it won't look inside ZIP archives, but it should address at least some of these limitations before the final release. Though you can't search on specific fields, such as the To field in e-mail messages, the automatic organization of results into tabs almost obviates the need for that level of detail. We look forward to the product's final release.