Long time readers might remember that I have been using these desktop search tools for a long time.  I started with lookout, moved to copernic, moved on to google (never posted), then msn, and last night installed yahoo.

All of the tools have pluses and minuses, and I have really enjoyed working with all of them.  After just a little time with the yahoo search, though, I think this one will be a keeper (until the next release).  I don't want to get into a full review since there are probably about 50k of them being written today, but I did want to share my thoughts on why I think yahoo will be the keeper.

For me, one of the most important aspects of a desktop search tool is searching code.  Finding emails is great, pdfs, fantastic, but the real power comes from being able to find any code, at any time, just by remembering something such as an obscure comment you may have put (like //comment this later  :)  , in a matter of seconds.  This, to me, is power.  It makes me more productive, and much more likely to do research on past usage scenarios of the various things we do.  That being said, my choice is GREATLY influenced by how the product works with my piles and piles of code.

So, why yahoo?  MSN, and copernic both also index code out of the box, and google's offering can be modified to search some code, so what makes yahoo better for me?  First off, the memory usage.  As a developer, I burn through resources like they were kindling.  Gig of ram?  Filled by noon.  So when I noticed that the memory requirements of the yahoo offering appear to be the lowest, and by a pretty sizable margin.  MSN seemed to be the biggest culprit taking upto 100 megs of memory/swap space at a time (between all of the components combined), where yahoo (so far) never goes above 30.  Still early in the tests, so this may change, but my initial impression is very good on this front. 

MSN's interface was (and probably still is my favorite), but the yahoo offering is a close second, with one huge improvement.  Search context, from the first letter you type.  So lets say you are looking to see how you've used an xmltextreader in the past.  Start typing, and by the time you get to xmlte you have all of the files, with highlighting of the use, in the search app.  Very, very nice.  I knew X1 did this, and knew if it filtered down to yahoo it would be a huge plus for me. 

So it seems like I have changed desktop searches as much as underwear in the past few months, but I think at least for now I have a clear cut winner.  For me, yahoo takes round 1.  And yes, I do realize it probably has ALOT to do with being last to the table.