I don’t see it on their web site yet, but search engine company X1 today announced an investment of $10 million, lead by USVP. X1 is the search engine that Yahoo! uses as the base for its desktop search product.

I wonder about the future of desktop search. Between Google and Yahoo providing free integrated deskptop-web search functionality (on Wintel, anyway), and Microsoft and Apple providing instant metadata indexing at the file system (in Longhorn and Tiger), is there a market for anyone else?

Apparently X1 wonders as well. They say the $10MM will go to their yet-to-launch enterprise search product, which I guess aims it squarely in the face of players like Autonomy and Verity.