About.com Rating
The Bottom Line
Yahoo! Desktop Search offers speedy, convenient and functional access to emails and attachments in Outlook and Outlook Express. Unfortunately, these are the only email programs supported and Yahoo! Desktop Search does not organize emails or search results by relevancy. Neither does it index in real time.
Yahoo! Desktop Search is no longer available.
Pros
- Yahoo! Desktop Search finds emails and attachments with speed any accuracy
- Searches can be saved in Yahoo! Desktop Search for even faster access
- Yahoo! Desktop Search previews and lets you open, reply to and otherwise handle emails instantly
Cons
- Yahoo! Desktop Search only supports Outlook and Outlook Express email, Yahoo! instant messaging
- Emails are not indexed in real time by Yahoo! Desktop Search
- Yahoo! Desktop Search does not thread emails or sort by relevancy
Description
- Yahoo! Desktop Search finds emails, IM conversations, attachments, contacts and files fast.
- Messages in Outlook and Outlook Express are indexed periodically.
- You can specify which email folders you want to include in Yahoo! Desktop Search.
- Yahoo! Desktop Search lets you search globally or in fields such as sender, subject, or date.
- Search criteria can be saved and organized in folders for faster access in Yahoo! Desktop Search.
- Yahoo! Desktop Search includes a toolbar that lets you search directly from Outlook.
- You can preview messages and attachments in a rich but privacy conscious manner.
- Yahoo! Desktop Search also provides direct links to opening, answering or forwarding emails.
- LiveWords lets you find web results related to keywords from desktop content instantly.
- Yahoo! Desktop Search supports Windows 2000/3/XP.
Guide Review - Yahoo! Desktop Search 1.2 - Email Search Tool
Sending and receiving emails is great, but finding the relevant message years later is the holy grail of email usability. Yahoo! Desktop Search helps Outlook and Outlook Express improve in the latter respect. Unfortunately, other email programs and conversations in instant messaging clients other than Yahoo! Messenger are not searched by Yahoo! Desktop Search
With emails and, thankfully, a large number of attachments types, Yahoo! Desktop Search provides as-you-type and really fast access including a privacy-conscious preview of the message or file and handy shortcuts to working with the results, though. You can immediately reply to emails, for example. Indexing, though speedy itself, is not so immediate as it happens only on a schedule instead of on the fly.
While you can use a number of criteria to fine-tune search results, Yahoo! Desktop Search cannot sort the results by relevancy, and it does not connect the data it finds to any other data it could find. You cannot open a thread from a single search result or go to related contacts easily in Yahoo! Desktop Search, for example.
Outlook gets a toolbar that lets you search easily, but for repeated searches, Yahoo! Desktop Search offers even faster access: search criteria can be saved, and saved searches can even be organized in folders. And talking of folders, Yahoo! Desktop Search lets you specify for each email client which folders you want it to index and search.