O-yA DeepSearch Delves Into Small Networks
SEARCHING STILL HAS a blind spot. If you need to
find something on the Internet, Google has you covered.
If you want to dig up something on your hard drive,
any number of utilities (from Yahoo and others)
will locate that. But if you want to find something
on your coworker's hard drive or on a shared server
on your company's intranet, you may be out of luck.
O-yA's DeepSearch 100 is designed to fix that problem.
This thin, $2999 tower plugs into a small network,
locates the other machines, and indexes their contents.
So the next time you need to locate the marketing
brochure that Sally worked on last fall, you just
plug in a couple of keywords and pull it up.
Is DeepSeardi TOO really so simple? Not quite,
but the innovative product is a promising start
in a soon-to-be-important category that many businesses
will welcome.
The uncomplicated case sports little more than
an ethernet port, a power button, and the company's
goofy logo. You administer the box from another
PC on the network via a browser-based interface.
(The first versions of the device functioned only
on networks based on a workgroup. At this writing,
the company is testing a new version that will work
on typically larger domain-based networks.)
I found my shipping DeepSearch 100 unit pretty
easy to set up on a small network of Windows notebooks.
As happens with any other product that depends on
Windows networking, you'll be asked some arcane
questions about DNS and proxy servers--and O-yA
could have done a better job of explaining those
confusing choices. Its documentation is pretty slim.
Once I got it set up, DeepSearch 100 did a good
job of finding the Windows, Linux, and Mac systems
on my network and identifying the folders that were
designated for sharing. When I selected the folders
that I wanted it to index, die device took less
than half an hour to index more than 8000 documents.
It indexes Outlook e-mail messages: Word. WordPerfect,
and plain-text documents; Web pages; PowerPoint
presentations; Excel spreadsheets; and PDFs. The
unit will index up to 100.000 files. If you're looking
for images, however, you're out of luck.
NO REFINING RESULTS
SEARCHING FOR A file involves typing search terms
into a box on a spare white browser page (sound
familiar?). My results came back just a tad slower
than they do in a Google search, but the delay wasn't
bothersome. Unfortunately, you have few options
for narrowing your search in DeepSearch 100. Searches
simply look for all documents that contain every
keyword you list. You can't search for instances
of an exact phrase, and you can't exclude results
that have a certain keyword.
Once you have the opportunity to share your data
with coworkers, your next questions, of course,
will be "How much of my stuff do I really want
them to see?" and "Who should see it?"
DeepSearch 100 allows you to set permissions by
folder, but I found the system far from intuitive
and had to call support to figure out the process.
I think lots of businesses that try DeepSearch
100 will soon find it indispensable. Getting it
up and running the first time isn't as easy as it
should be, but that's probably not a surprise in
a product category as new as this one.
