The Little Engine That Could, AskJeeves has upgraded their desktop search application. One of the most interesting aspects of this upgrade is not the upgrade itself but how they define search on the desktop versus search on the web.
According to Jeeves, search on the web involves some sort of “social relevance” to put results in perspective. Search on the desktop can be a much harder task for the search engine companies since it usually involves some sort of “personal relevance” to the user. What this means is that on the web, results are refined due to a feedback loop and input from many users who form a social group.
For desktop search, there is not this kind of social group as it may be only one person and the feedback loop is limited. Delivering results on a desktop search can be quite a task considering a search application and algorithm has to guess at what is personally relevant to you.
Time is also a consideration in desktop search. Are you searching for a recent document, or the same document over and over or one from sometime in the past? It will be interesting if one day the search engines (if they’re not already doing this) use some sort of behavior profiling on the desktop, where users search behaviors are stored, mapped and over time, the search appliance reacts to a user’s standard set of behaviors in order to deliver personally relevant results.
Anyway, it looks like AskJeeves is on the right track with this upgrade, especially with the Folder Indexing Preferences feature where the user gets to choose what to index. They have a few other enhancements that Jeeves fans will enjoy as well.
