Zmarties

I installed the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search - actually install itself is a good experience, its a small download, and actually asks where I want to place the software.

On first running, it offered me its option panels, which allowed me to select custom indexing, but they are simply not custom enough - the choice is between just the default Windows location file locations (which I never use if I have a choice), and "all my files". The email is likewise all, or nothing - so I cant exclude things like my deleted mail folder.

The results screen does offer a preview panel, which is its one plus point, but also its undoing - an image search gave results that the preview panel not only failed to display (which I can probably live with), but which took the whole program down with it. (The image in question was a jpg file in the browser cache - which was corrupted by being truncated - a regular occurrence when downloading files. The standard Windows XP image view can show the file fine - with the missing blocks just "chunkier" than the rest).

Not only did the crash kill the Jeeves.exe program, but since it went down whilst still holding handles to my Outlook email, Outlook was unusable until I rebooted my machine.

I'm not the only one to find this program crashes on them - InsideGoogle has a similar experience.

Since I dont expect to be keeping this program on my machine much longer, I'll quickly see how it stacks up against my review checklist of a couple of days ago. Lots of dont knows, since I'm not spending time getting too deep into this program - I already know its not for me.

• does it offer "search as you type" - NO
  
• can you search for filenames, as well as searching within the file contents - YES
  
• can you do wildcard searches - I dont think so
  
• can you do soundex searches, when you say can't remember exactly how you spelt something - NO
  
• can you do case sensitive searches - I dont think so
  
• can searches be arbitrarily complex, or are you restricted in the number of terms you can include in the search - not checked
  
• can you save searches you need to do regularly (as bookmarks, or some other save mechanism) - didn't see any such mechanism
  
• does the result page show a contextual snippet of the matches - NO
  
• can the results "preview" the document found, so that its possible to search and find information in files without having to open the document in its original application - YES - but severely limited and buggy