Yahoo! has jumped headlong into the deepening pool of vendors that are determined to establish themselves as leaders in the desktop search market. Yahoo! joins AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google and MSN in efforts to develop solutions that index and search hard drives as efficiently as they do the Web.

The company has paired up with search provider X1 to produce a beta version of Yahoo! Desktop Search within the coming weeks.

A spokesperson issued BetaNews a statement that cited consumer feedback as motivation for providing a unified search engine that dissolves the difference between queries for desktop content such as photos, digital media, Office documents, instant messaging logs, address books and the Web.

As first reported by BetaNews, America Online is also cooking up its own desktop search technology that has already been integrated into beta builds of the AOL Browser. AOL's contribution to desktop search provides much of the same functionality as Yahoo!'s intended product, but also indexes Microsoft Internet Explorer offline Web pages and locally stored newsgroups. Yahoo! has not yet announced if its software can do the same.

AOL's future plans call for extending the software's existing newsgroup and Web log search functionality to the Web, as well as searches for e-mail sent or received via AOL Mail and the ability to search AOL host content and content saved on AOL. Non-members will be offered the alternative of Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express integration.

Google has also announced its own beta of its Desktop Search application. Although the arrival of Google's software came intriguingly close to word of AOL's endeavors, AOL spokesperson Anne Bentley told BetaNews that Google did not provide the technology that lies beneath the hood of its engine. AOL has outsourced the project to an unspecified search provider.

Google has taken the same technology that powers its Web searches and has applied it to the desktop. The company has claimed that its Web search engine can sort through billions of Web pages within a split second, making desktop searches almost instantaneous.

Last July, Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehdie demoed a new search engine that scours hard drives for information. Mehdi showed off a prototype of the technology that was integrated into the MSN Toolbar add-on for Internet Explorer. Since then, images leaked to the Web have revealed the engine's presence in Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook.

Industry insiders contend that the oft-delayed Microsoft Longhorn operating system has thrown open a window of opportunity for competitors to gain some momentum on the software giant before Longhorn ships. With 160 million registered subscribers, Yahoo! is confident that it can set anchor before Longhorn hits the shelves and provide "the best" desktop search solutions for its customers.