New AJDS Updates

Today we released some upgrades to Ask Jeeves Desktop Search that make it faster to find things on your computer, in your email, and on the Web. 

Desktop search presents an interesting challenge, significantly different from Web search.  In crawling files and emails we don't have the benefit of leveraging the social network of the Web to determine relevance (at least not yet).  Instead, most of the content you are searching for has a personal relevance factor and usually has a time component.  You're either looking for something over and over again or you need to find something from a long time ago. 

Here are some of the new features for AJDS: 

-- Folder Indexing Preferences (choose what to index!)

-- Improved PDF indexing

-- Email attachment name indexing

-- Improved Zip file indexing

-- Enhanced previews for Office files

-- Indexing of iTunes metadata (search by title, artist, album, genre, and year)

-- Search term highlighting

-- Full Outlook Express support

-- Pause indexing (with new animated indexing graphic)

-- Improved stability overall 

-- New homepage with most recently viewed files

-- Improved status callouts

-- Writely document search (yes, Web-based word processing search...in a desktop search tool!)

(For those who have been asking about API and Extension support, rest assured they are on the roadmap.)

As always feedback is appreciated!

Jeff Sidlosky
Manager, Desktop Search