Marc Andrews — Functionality vs. Simplicity — What Will Guide Your Desktop Search Decision?

30 September 2006
First impressions can be misconceiving. Would you rather have something that was very simple to use at first glance, but often didn’t help you find what you were looking for as quickly, or something that could help you immediately narrow in on that e-mail or contact you were looking for much faster, but used a different interface than you are used to, and possibly took you a day to figure out?

I’ve recommended the X1 Desktop Search solution to several folks, but the initial reaction has been quite intriguing. They almost always come back to me, right after they’ve installed it, and say, “this looks complicated!”

I’ve been using the X1 Enterprise Client for several months. Like Marc Andrews, I prefer it to the other free alternatives (including the new Copernic) but have not found it as responsive as he does. For some reason, X1 hesitates, often for over a minute, before starting searching. X1’s technical people suggested uninstalling the software and replacing it with an updated version but that made no difference.

That’s a pity, because, as Andrews says, X1 offers a wider range of searching and presentation choices than its competition. Perhaps it’s just my resident gremlin at work; you might not encounter the problem. You can get X1 Enterprise Client from the X1 Web site or, in a slightly defeatured version, as Yahoo! Desktop Search. (This X1 press release details the differences.)

IBM, for whom Andrews works, partners with X1 for desktop search software.

[A day later] Murphy’s Law works — with a little help. Having been criticised, X1 is today working perfectly.

I uninstalled the software last night and replaced it with a still newer version. Now, I get the type-ahead that Marc Andrews mentioned. X1 also responds quickly when I cut and paste a search term in or put it in inverted commas (for an exact match). It did not do this for me before.

I can recommend it without qualification, therefore.