Search Tools Compare

MSN Search


Lookout Search


Google Search


Beagle Search

As you'd know from other posts I've made, I'm playing around with Dashboard and Beagle, so as the proprietry world started copying the GNOME project's efforts, I was very keen to see what they produced.

Taking eat your own dogfood to a new level, I decided to install Lookout, MSN and Google Search on my work Windows laptop simultaneously. Despite having 3 indexes of everything now, and suffering from slowness when resuming from hibernation (when the MSN decides it needs to reindex everything *sigh*), I can at least now see how they all compare.

After a month of running all these search tools and comparing against Beagle (running on shadowfax, my Linux development laptop) my thoughts are that Beagle still has a few rough edges, but is just as quick and amazingly presents a better user interface (due to people like tigert over at Novell). Beagle does have some bleeding-edge dependencies (including rml's inotify that hasn't made it into the kernel yet). And Beagle, using Mono, leaks memory. But besides these things :) Beagle is doing pretty well - I look forward to it becoming part of mainstream distros.

So what's left to complete this is to compare against the Apple offering once it becomes available later this year and once I get access to a Mac :-)

tech/code | 12 Jan 2005 | #

The Right Thing

IBM today shows that it's not just a company that talks up open-source, but that really contributes back. They have opened up 500 patents from their vast portfolio for free use in open-source software. And they just haven't limited it to some OSS licence that gives IBM some monopolistic benefit - any OSI approved open source licence as of 11 Jan 2005 benefits from this gift.

Thank you IBM - much appreciated.

tech/IP | 12 Jan 2005 | #