Ask Jeeves Inc. on Tuesday joined competitors in announcing plans to release a desktop search application that would list information from a user's PC along with web-search results.

The Emeryville, Calif., company plans to make the beta version of the application available Wednesday for free download from the Ask Jeeves web site. In releasing the software, the company will join rivals Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which currently have preview versions of their products available. Yahoo Inc. has announced plans to release similar technology in January.

Ask Jeeves said its desktop search product is an "important" step in the company's strategy to personalize search for users.

The 750KB application searches a PC user's hard drive by file name, as well as by content. The software supports Microsoft Office files, simple text files, Microsoft Outlook email messages, and image, music and video files.

The product supports Windows 2000 and XP, Office 2000 or higher, and Outlook 2003. It requires a minimum of a Pentium III computer running at 400MHz with 128MB of RAM. The completed-version of the software is scheduled to ship in 2005.