Most firms have had a knowledge management (KM) initiative for some time now. Expensive KM systems are used to manage disparate information from around the company, whether that be in databases, client relationship management systems, document management systems, the intranet, internet or simply shared directories and network drives. However, these usually underperform unless users share the information in the 'right' manner. This can prove a problem in two ways, the more sinister of which is the users' desire not to share their work with the company. The other, more common reason, is the fact that users do not necessarily have the time to contribute their documents, spreadsheets, images and other files.

The desktop revolution that gave us our own processor and our own storage has led to thousands of islands of information sources around a company – the users' local hard drives. Users can manage their own drives as they wish, but as the volume of files on the drive grows the search functionality provided within the operating system begins to fall down.

Desktop search is not a new concept, and a lot of the major KM vendors have offered licensed versions to run alongside their enterprise search engines. What has changed in the past six months is the entry of the major internet search players, whose brands are trusted by millions of people, who use the search engines as their window to the web. Having the same power over the content on your own drive means more and more users are itching for the download button.

We will examine some of the most popular solutions here.

Google desktop

Google web search is the most popular in the world. Most users are familiar with the simple interface and are confident that the results returned are both accurate and up to date. Brand loyalty has paid dividends; many people have adopted Google's desktop tool without bothering to investigate the alternatives.

It is quick to download, simple to start indexing and does not prove a drain on resources on the machine. The interface is browser-based and provides users with the oh-so-familiar Google search and results pages.

However, I found the index slow to update and as time using the tool rolled on there were increasing numbers of web pages returned which I had visited in the past along with the documents I wanted to find, which succeeded in diluting the quality of the result. Naturally, it is possible to exclude web pages from being indexed but how many users are going to go to the effort of checking their settings? Also, the simplistic way in which the results are returned (true to the Google web interface) lacked the sophistication offered in some of the other tools.

The 'viewed web pages' addition to the Google index also raises a security issue for which Google has received some bad press, as it also includes secure pages that required a log-in. Gartner has also highlighted the recently fixed security hole, which would have enabled hackers to access the local index on a user's machine, as a reason for companies to carefully consider the use of all desktop search technologies prior to deployment within the corporate environment.

Copernic desktop search

The Copernic desktop search is a slightly larger download and the name may not be as familiar to most users as the main players reviewed here but I found it to be by far the best all-round solution.

The interface is presented in a separate application, rather than the browser as favoured by most of the familiar names. It is simple to get to grips with and provides results as soon as you begin to type your query. The results returned are easily ordered by selecting the relevant field (title, date, size, etc) just as you would in Windows Explorer. The most compelling reason to use Copernic is the preview pane, which leaps to the first instance of the query in the window and allows you to skip through to the next instance, all without having to open the document. The indexing speed was good and the impact on the machine minimal. I also found that this solution updates its index faster than the others. This is because Copernic will re-index documents as soon as they are saved.

Yahoo! desktop

For committed users of Yahoo! this tool makes a lot of sense as it can index your Yahoo! Mail, Contacts and Instant-Message logs, along with more than 200 document types on your local machine.

The search in Yahoo! is good, but unlike Google, the results look cluttered with information which can prove confusing to users. The preview pane renders well but lacks the highlighting feature in Copernic.

The Yahoo! desktop is based on X1 Desktop search, which also offers an enterprise version which may be worth offering to users, but this comes at a cost.

Ask Jeeves desktop

Ask Jeeves, which has recently re-branded itself as a 'find engine', always seems to be playing catch up to the big three of Google, Yahoo! and MSN search. In the case of its desktop search, unfortunately not a lot has changed.

While the interface is probably the most useable of all those seen, Ask Jeeves lets itself down by the limited document types it supports. Also, Powerpoint and Excel files are not rendered in the preview pane.

MSN Toolbar Suite

Microsoft has been one step behind Google's innovation in the past couple of years, so much so that the recent re-launch of MSN search was code-named 'Operation Underdog'.

This is perhaps why we find MSN Toolbar Suite imitating Google. Microsoft's offering is a simple browser-based interface, with the added functionality of a pop-up blocker and auto form fill that has been in place in the Google search bar for a long time, which works very well. The results are returned with additional information to Google desktop and can be sorted by the information returned.

The accuracy of the search was very good indeed, but I felt the summaries where not as good as a separate preview pane would be. The other drawback is a lack of support for PDF documents.

John Field is a KM systems specialist and a content management systems vendor at Percussion.