Yahoo! Releases Desktop Search Tool

Hobadee writes "According to The Register, Yahoo! has released a desktop search program to compete with Google's. Apparently Yahoo's version is native to Windows, and thus faster than Google's, but less portable. Other question - what does this mean for things like the Google Search Appliance? Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Comments

Well

[Lord Kano]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'....

I'm still digging slocate.

LK

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs this anyway. Never have I thought to myself, gee, wish I could Google (or Yahoo!) my pc.

Most people I know reformat their HD every couple of months anyway.

Now something that searches my stock of CD's in the closet...

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people I know reformat their HD every couple of months anyway.

*snicker*
Most people you know need either better operating systems or better skills working a computer.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother d00d, those 0-dAY! W/\r3Z are like so lame after a month anyways.

Re:Well

[new-black-hand]

I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

That does not search the contents of files. Nor does locate.

Re:Well

[dooglio]

...but 'find / -exec grep -Hni bork \{\} \;' does... :-)

Re:Well

[Marciojc]

And you wait 60 min for search all contents. :)

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

You mention warez, but the primary reason people need to do this is spyware actually. A lot of people get hit with spyware without doing anyting wrong, ethically speaking.

The point is that desktop search is not something the average user needs or has ever needed.

Re:Well

[vivin]

find / | xargs grep [whatever]

Finds content.

find in cron?

[Anonymous Coward]

you're better off with updatedb/locate .. :)

you know ...

[wobblie]

locate (1) has been around for quite some time now ...

Re:you know ...

[Anonymous Coward]

locate 4 lyf

Re:you know ...

[spellraiser]

locate (1) has been around for quite some time now ...

On Windows? For non-geeks?

Don't think so, somehow. It's easy enough to point out Unix command-line tools that do the job of any application such as this one, but what exactly is the point?

Will geeks use this Yahoo! tool? No

Does Yahoo! care? No

Just because a tool is not useful for us geeks, it doesn't mean it's useless, period.

Re:you know ...

[damiam]

I think the parent was responding to the summary's comment about find and grep, not the Yahoo tool.

Re:you know ...

[pseudochaotic]

But of course you should use slocate(1), since locate also returns other users' files, which is almost always a very bad thing.

Re:you know ...

[Fweeky]

In answer to your first and second question, Yes.

Not really what these search tools are about, but that's not what you asked.

Re:you know ...

[nwbvt]

So you are saying non-geek Windows users use find and grep to find files?

I did not know that.

Re:you know ...

[TheUnknownOne]

Yes but you must take into account that on MOST modern systems, locate is symlinked to slocate so as not to confuse people use to slocate while moving them to the better alternative. (I know it came that way on the many different linux distrobutions I have used.)

Re:you know ...

[skids]

locate is nice, other than updatedb really thrashing things if you have a whole lot of files.

I once found the weblogs on a server where I had an account, and sent the sysadmin (a friend of mine) a question about his configuration, quoting the logs. The logs were obscurely placed, so he was mystified as to how I had found them, I responded "locate access.log", to which he replied, "Oh, I've never used that hippy locate command. :-)"

As far as searching within files, glimpse was useful for text. Don't know if it has been updated for other formats. rgrep works for what it does. Use the right tool for the right job.

Re:you know ...

[northcat]

Use your fucking brain. The grandparent post was refering to "find / > index". And what kind of an idiot modded the parent post as interesting?

Re:you know ...

[adeydas]

does geeks use windows? no. does yahoo care? no. does google care? surprisingly no.

not true

[mr_tommy]

To be clear, Yahoo haven't actually released anything yet; they've licensed the tech from another company (pretty poor show) and will be slapping some branding on it with a launch planned for 2005.

Re:not true

[Staplerh]

If I ever got mod-points, I'd mod this one up. Wow, I RTFA and didn't pick up on that, and apparently the article poster didn't either.

Although to give the poster some credit, that website 'The Register' is not the best written of websites.

Re:not true

[br0ck]

I'm on the X1 beta test team and the latest builds are amazing. I can search through 600,000 items as fast as I type. I have it indexing all email, my local drives, and all directories on content and web servers that I care about. Doing phone support or debugging and being able to quickly recall every email, document or piece of code pertaining to an issue has been an awesome productivity boost. /two cents

Re:not true

[kzinti]

I RTFA and didn't pick up on that

It's right there in the first line: "Yahoo! has licensed the X1 search software for Windows from tech incubator Idealab..."

Re:not true

[Anonymous Coward]

yep, dead handy that article.. I just looked for the program, to download it in fact after being unimpressed with google, and blinkx

oh well.

Re:not true

[Martin Blank]

Does it update as files or e-mails are removed? This is an issue that I have with the current Google tool, and one that may well get all of the newer desktop search tools banned from my employer's network.

Re:not true

[br0ck]

Deleted files and emails disappear for me as soon as X1 indexes and I believe the default indexing interval for email is 15 minutes and for files is 60 minutes--which is easily changed.

Re:not true

[mollymoo]

If I ever got mod-points, I'd mod this one up. Wow, I RTFA and didn't pick up on that, and apparently the article poster didn't either.

Although to give the poster some credit, that website 'The Register' is not the best written of websites.

First line of first linked FA: "Yahoo! has licensed the X1 search software for Windows from tech incubator Idealab".

I guess the difference between you and I is that I not only read the FA but also took the time to understand it.

Is making a serious attempt at reading and understanding the article really too much to ask before you make a comment which will be seen by tens of thousands of people?

Re:not true

[Anonymous Coward]

You're new here, aren't you?

Re:not true

[alphakappa]

"Yahoo! gives! away! free! desktop! search!

It is blindingly fast at both indexing and retrieval - which is near instant - and has the huge advantage over Google Desktop Search of being a native Windows client. It integrates into the desktop but perhaps more importantly, allows users to browse the returned search results much quicker than futzing around in a browser, and opening the original document."

Is that journalism or an advertisement?

Re:not true

[Anonymous Coward]

The amazing thing is how poor all of these tools are in this regard. It is fairly easy to index changes in real time; MS Index Server does this with a custom NT file system hook, although it is a resource hog when turned on on a low-end system. Why wait? Well, crappy google and X1/Yahoo engineering are one answer.

Re:not true

[The Cydonian]

That website 'The Register' is not the best written of websites.

See, this is where you made the mistake. El Reg is well-written alright, but for someone looking for information; rather, it's well-written for those sorts who wouldn't mind spending some quality time slacking off on weekday afternoons, after spending the morning reading up "real" news at BBC, C|Net and so on. Like me, for instance.

Seriously though, El Reg has been pretty jihad-ist (and sensational) in its coverage of everything Google-related; beginning to wonder why.

always 1 behind yahoo

[djxploit]

cant seem to get ahead can u... :(

Re:always 1 behind yahoo

[Anonymous Coward]

DAMN YOU!
Can't open file: 'sessions.MYD'. (errno: 145)

And here I was, ready to browse some amateur chicks :(

Yea works for me too.

[LoveTheIRS]

Yep "find / | grep whatever-I-Want" works great for me too

Re:Yea works for me too.

[prodangle]

Yep "find / | grep whatever-I-Want" works great for me too

Should I take this seriously, or are you being sarcastic. Yeah, find / is great - but only if you're willing to wait hours for an answer. It's probably no quicker that the built in Find option in Windows. GDS will find everything you want in not much more than a microsecond.

Re:Yea works for me too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not exactly sure but I think that GDS creates an index.

Windows regular search of course searches on the fly. Slow.

Windows does provide indexing services. Then using indexed information you can search pretty fast. The indexing doesn't work all that great tho. I had to use this feature at work to provide a search ability on one of our internal sites, and it worked "most of the time". Of course if the server was indexing when you searched, you could possibly get an error back which is just plain unacceptable. And of course you could also write a desktop tool to do the search on your local "catalogs" instead of writing a web script to search a website.

Maybe this is totally irrelevant. Just thought I'd share what little I know. :)

Re:Yea works for me too.

[rpozz]

Remember that the next time you use find (without rebooting), the Linux kernel will have cached the filesystem, making it take only a few seconds.

Re:Yea works for me too.

[LoveTheIRS]

With ReiserFS find / | grep "esoteric-file" is pretty damn fast, under a minute. But not like the 2 seconds searches that the desktop googling people are talking about.

i wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

i wonder what wonderful 'features' it has that run in the background.

Hmm..

[Staplerh]

It doesn't, as yet, index your browser history, but as Google has discovered with GDS, this can be a double-edged sword.

Now they can market it as the Desktop Search Tool of the privacy-concious, and call a lack of a feature a good safe feature. I know this horse has been flogged to death on the other threads concerning Google Desktop Search, but puhleese.

It is blindingly fast at both indexing and retrieval - which is near instant - and has the huge advantage over Google Desktop Search of being a native Windows client.

Don't know what to say - if it does serve 97 percent of the computer market more effectively, then perhaps they will dominate the system. It'll be interesting to see if this turns into a battle of paradigms: programs native to an OS (i.e. Yahoo!) or browser based (Google).

Re:Hmm..

[Thats_Pipe]

Most software battles will come down to native-based vs. web-based. In both cases, its a matter of bandwidth. If bandwidth to the web is bad, native progs win out but if the bandwidth of the web grew larger than any single computer, we may end up running most of our apps remotely, limited only by the system we have.

Re:Hmm..

[nzkoz]

Of course, the killer feature of GDS for me, is that the results get integrated with your regular google results. So I have one place I go to search everything I need.

If Yahoo's offering won't do that it's pretty much worthless to me, no matter how fast the gui is.

Re:Hmm..

[tpearson]

Google desktop search isn't limited by bandwidth - it runs its own server on your computer and serves results from that, there just isn't a stand-alone client for viewing the results (better IMHO)

Re:Hmm..

[oradata]

Yeah, because it's really hard to get to 127.0.0.1 without a large pipe ...

For some reason, it seems 127.0.0.1 always has what I'm looking for, excellent site! I just wish I had more bandwidth .. sniff

Searching file content!

[PornMaster]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...

Which helps you find the e-mail from Aunt Mary where she told you the location of her will... how?

grepping a file list does nothing for searching the contents of your files... which both of these products do.

Re:Searching file content!

[Sebastopol]

'find /' also is unsuitable if you have many mounted file servers. I did the same thing at my work and I ended up killing the process after 24 hours...

just my $.02

Re:Searching file content!

[crow]

Just don't try doing 'find /afs' and forget about it for a few weeks...

Re:Searching file content!

[pseudochaotic]

Well, the obvious solution is the following:

cat `find /` > index

And then grepping from index.

Re:Searching file content!

[Anonymous Coward]

WOW thats a horrible idea.

Re:Searching file content!

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

cat `find /` > index

And then how do you figure out which file the text is from? And cat `find /` basically means "print everything on my drive". cat /dev/hda would work as well - or better, since it shows deleted files and stuff.

What you probably meant was grep foo `find /`, which a quick test shows would work. Add the line-number switch and you're set. Only thing is that it can't read from binary files (Word docs, PDFs, compressed files, etc.)

Maybe there's a filesystem that can mount an existing folder (or a drive) as decrypted text only - incorporating antiword and such?

Re:Searching file content!

[nwbvt]

That might end up being a fairly large index file...

In fact, unless I'm missing something with regard to how cat and find works, it would be as big as the used portion of your disk. What happens if your disk is 72% full?

Re:Searching file content!

[md17]

I agree with your point, but the example is poor. If you know it was an email, then why not use your email client for the search? Email clients are tuned for that kind of thing, and these days I would bet that most people don't keep their email physically on their computers.

So maybe a better example is finding that document I wrote a few years ago in which I used a quote from "Ralph Waldo Emerson". And in that instance since most people keep their documents in a central place, maybe grep -r isn't so bad after all.

Re:Searching file content!

[northcat]

Actually, I find parent to be quite funny.

Re:Searching file content!

[edesio]

One should try glimpse by Udi Manber actually in yahoo!

It can index and search for words, substrings, and sentence. It handles multi-line records, do approximate searches, and is pretty smart and fast.

Re:Searching file content!

[Tim Browse]

If you know it was an email, then why not use your email client for the search? Email clients are tuned for that kind of thing

Hahahaha!

Thanks - that was a good one :)

Re:Searching file content!

[runderwo]

Dumbass. grep foo /dev/hda is a much better method, because you don't need the intermediate file.

Re:Searching file content!

[runderwo]

Hmm, never noticed the '-mount' or '-xdev' options?

Re:Searching file content!

[Whyrph]

Naw. It's much butter to do 'find / -exec cat {} >> index \;' :)

Re:Searching file content!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi nwbvt, I'm humor. Nice to meet you.

Re:Searching file content!

[nuintari]

And of course, you could create an index like this, or use the one that about 99% of all modenr unix system's already have. The command is 'locate'.

I heart reinventing the wheel due to ignorance.

Re:Searching file content!

[Sebastopol]

No, I never noticed those. Who reads manpages anyway? ;-)

Thanks for the tips.

What is wrong with the current tools?

[Space_Soldier]

I search for a file every few months since my files are categorized, and I easily find them by browsing. What exactly is wrong with the current desktop search tools like the one found in Windows Explorer that makes these companies create alternatives?

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[glassjaw rocks]

Because, everybody wants thier computer to be unique. But their attempt to accomplish this is reminiscent of the same people that drive Honda Civics, with spinner hubcaps and thier hoods painted black. Everybody that tries to be different ends up having the same "C00 M0D5!!" that everybody else has.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

The simple fact that you don't have *their* tool yet.

You clearly don't get the whole marketing thing.

(I want to go back in time to before "market" was a verb.)

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[HermanAB]

The Windoze search tools are sloooooooow and don't work very well, but most of all, common users simply don't know how to use it.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Jad LaFields]

Yeah, I haven't fully understood what the recent crazy about Desktop Searching has been. Sure, there's a number of people who have a good use for it, examples I've read by other slashdotters in other threads, but seriously, how many people actually need this? The windows search tool isn't great, but its certainly been enough for the couple of times I've actually had to search for a file in the last couple of months. And I have a buttload of files: well over 200 gigs. Most people barely fill their 10 gig Dell laptop hard drives. As for the other uses for GDS: email searching? Every email program does this, and good enough. I don't really even want to get into the other features, they all are along the same lines, except for the text-searching, which grep and yes, windows search tool do too. Maybe not as good, not as fast, but how many people do that often enough to make it worthwhile to install a whole new program to do if for you?

What I'm saying is that while I certainly can see a use for this for power users, I don't see enough whiz-banginess for all these big-name companies to start pour vast funds into. I just feel like these articles should be about some no-name freeware software from nonags.org or a geeky open-source project from sourceforge. Does grandma really need this?

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[randalx]

I don't know about you, but the windows search on my machines is extremely slow. I really only use it as a last resort and I make sure to specify a directory. While the google one is so fast that sometimes I just use it instead of navigating the directory tree.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[imac.usr]

(I want to go back in time to before "market" was a verb.)

"Ogg, we've really got to do something to build brand awareness of this whole 'cooking meat instead of just eating it raw' idea. Any ideas?"

"Well, Jim, maybe we could offer it at a discount to certain people in the food services industry; you know, try to build a groundswell of support for it among them, and let them tell others how great it is. Plus we'll have a big ad campaign that kicks off during next year's Super Mammoth Hunt."

"Brilliant! Ogg, you've got a great future here at Grunt, Grunt, OMGADINOSAURISEATIMGMEHELPAIEEE and Fleckstein."

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[kfg]

The fact that most people are disorginized slobs who don't put their toys away, I guess.

On another forum I recently ran across a guy who was wondering what to do when you "run out of space" on your start menu.

I suggested that he keep his socks, WD40, silverware and ratchet set in different drawers.

KFG

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, does grandma really need anything other than AOL and a weekly pictorial update on the grandkids?

I agree with most of your post, tho.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[BestNicksRTaken]

People write these things as it means the can insert their own adware and spyware and direct your searches towards sites that pay them.

Gullable people will install them as they are marketted - I doubt most people who install this crap even know the Explorer has a search function....

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[cirisme]

Every email program does this, and good enough.

A great innovator is one that doesn't know the meaning of "good enough." It may be "good enough" for most, but is that because it really is good enough or because most people don't know it can be better? If we stopped at "good enough", where would software be, especially open source software?

Maybe there isn't a vast market for this, but definately will be some(including me) that find this to be useful, especially when our productivity increases, thanks to a faster search, when we just can't remember where we put a paticular file. Even if it isn't a huge gain, it is a gain and makes our lives easier. Isn't that what software is for, anyway?

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[maskedbishounen]

Heh. We often make fun of Windows users for being disorganized, but when you take a look at the actual OS, it's fairly organized.

On the other hand, *NIX crowd, perhaps from working with the command line, has learned to organize their spaces into neat, tidy messes. And then take a look at /usr/bin or /usr/lib. Ouch.

Just a slightly off-topic, random thought.

Oh, and personally, I'm waiting for the SCO Desktop Search tool, to help me find all of my e-mails with legal threats attached. ;)

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggested that he keep his socks, WD40, silverware and ratchet set in different drawers.

Did you just brag about making fun of a guy in a forum?

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[bushidocoder]

The search tools of old simply return all files that contain a certain substring. You can sort them by name or date created, but that's about it. Desktop searching, on the other hand, has the oppurtunity to make guesses as to a document's relevance based on context, the very power that has made Google as useful as it is.

I've got a couple hundred technical ebooks on my box at work - With GDS if I search for "sql server replication performance", the ones that show up first are the ones that have entire chapters written about the subject. It'll still turn up that email where I bitched to a coworker about sql server replication performance sucking because the client had them connected through 6 vpns, but in all likelyhood, that's not the document I'm looking for.

On the same note, if my girlfriend searches her box for a specific legal document form, the empty templates always come up first, which is exactly what she's looking for 95% of the time. Last year, if she was looking for the IDS template for the French patent office, she'd have to wade through the 500 or so that were sitting on her work machine until she found it.

When Microsoft was talking about desktop search, they said that within 4 years, searching for a person's name on your computer will return photographs of them that you took on a vacation last year via face recognition. I highly doubt they'll beat Google to figuring out how to do that one right (and I doubt that anyone's figuring it out in 4 years), but who cares who invents it - ultimately that's something that has value to my grandma. What we're seeing now is the first generation of desktop search tools - gen1 might not be that much better than a find/grep, but the foundation of the technology allows it to go in directions that simple text searching just can't.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[kfg]

Did you just brag about making fun of a guy in a forum?

No. I didn't say a thing about how his mother dresses him.

KFG

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[spitefulcrow]

Can't forget /etc. Big pile of configurations in no real order. That and it's the "if we can't think of anywhere else to put this random text file it goes here" directory.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[GWTPict]

if my girlfriend searches her box

Fnur fnur.

Sorry.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Taladar]

For most people it is good enough not because it couldn't be better but because it is not worth the effort for something they don't use more than once a month or so.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Taladar]

And how does the Search Engine know the name=>face relation of people I know IRL? It's not like people would agree to a global database of face-recognition data linked to their name, at least in countries like germany (where I live) with privacy rights this would not be possible unless I tell my computer who is who at least once.

Re:What is wrong with the current tools?

[Taladar]

The difference is that you never need to look at the list of all files in this directories. Most of the time you either look for one specific file or check wether a certain file exists. Only automated tools work with the whole list and for them it does not matter how unsorted the directory is.

google will always rule

[munboy]

i think there is alot of brand in google, have you ever heard "i need to go yahoo that." until yahoo improves everything as a whole, nobody will care about thier products, no matter how much they buy. BTW, CTRL + F -> Ninjas not found PHAIL

Re:google will always rule

[Anonymous Coward]

mod parent intresting...

Re:google will always rule

[northcat]

mod parent as interesting.

Welcome to the 21st century

[slayer99]

Where we have "updatedb" and "locate". *grin*

for all the slocate guys

[theguywhosaid]

"find / | grep junk" and "updatedb; locate junk" both have one problem in common. they do not check the content of the file. try "grep junk `find /`". and really people, who wants to wait for that to finish?

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Tim C]

So what's wrong with "find / -exec grep junk {} \; -print"? Other than the speed, of course...

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Jugalator]

The whole point with these search engines is the speed.

Are we getting a bit off topic here?

Re:for all the slocate guys

[damiam]

The speed, the presentation, and the (missing) ranking by relevance.

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Tim C]

Are we getting a bit off topic here?

Yes - I was querying his piping the output of find to grep when you can just get find to execute grep for you. I completely agree that running grep over your entire hard drive is never gong to match a proper search app for speed...

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Anonymous Coward]

how about
# cd dir
# grep -nr junk *

that will do a recursive search of the contents of all the files in the directory you are currently in. It works very well. Especially with |grep -v "what you don't want displayed"

Of course the desktop searching tools are for different people. But from what I'm reading in this thread people here don't even know how to properly use the tools they are saying are much better. For example:

slocate "part of file name" | xargs grep -n "search term"

much better (and faster) than any of the other examples here. It not only shows the full path, but the full line and line number of the file.

I would log in, but lost my account info and the address associated with it years ago.

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Derek Pomery]

Glimpse and WebGlimpse have been around for ages.
Obviously their strength is text, but glimpse supports passing files through arbitrary filters which can output text it can use for indexing.
pdftotext for example, although one imagines extracting meaning from an mp3 would also be feasible.
Both are fairly fast and have been around for ages.

Re:for all the slocate guys

[Saeger]

How about ``grep -nir foobar /some/idea/where/im/looking/*'' to get more compact case-insensitive matches.

Another one I use often, but just for finding filenames that I only remember parts of:

locate -i majorfoo | egrep -i 'minorfoo|minorfoo2'

I almost do that often enough that I should script it... but it hasn't crossed the lazy-threshold.

Re:for all the slocate guys

[MoogMan]

Which brings up an interesting point. If these searching programs have a different algorithm for finding text/content in files, then isnt find/grep/locate doing something wrong? And/or is the filesystem not organised as efficiently as possible?

Just a thought...

Re:for all the slocate guys

[runderwo]

Yeah. I much prefer 'find / -exec cat {} >> /allmyfiles'. Then you can just grep that to see if what you're looking for is in any of your files. I haven't figured out how to get the filename back from it though, and also, the more and bigger files you have, the bigger the index gets for some strange reason. I haven't figured out those issues yet. I'm also being completely facetious, so shame on you if you've read this far in earnest.

'find / index' isn't the same thing.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Apples and oranges.

Google Desktop Search (and presumably Yahoo DS) also searches inside the actual files. If I search for "VPN", I see a list of all files (and Outlook messages) which contain the string "VPN".

'find / |grep' doesn't do any of that.... even "find / -exec grep foo {} \;" is much slower then an indexed database engine.

I haven't installed it (Not sure I trust it), but a coworker was showing it to me yesterday. Pretty handy...

X1 Software and Website

[David Hume]

X1 Website

15 Day Trial Version

find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

See? This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet. You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.

and stuff.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[mcrbids]

See? This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet. You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.

and stuff.

Is it just me, or does this sound very oxymoronic coming from somebody whose sig line says

"He who cannot in 64k program, cannot in 512k." ??

I mean, if 64k isn't consistent with 1979 computer technology, what is?

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[caluml]

Click where? What window opens? And I have to type what where? Stop being a troll.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

In what way does my "influence" using mutt prevent you from using Thunderbird?

For that matter, in what way does my using mutt make me a Luddite?

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

or that matter, in what way does my using mutt make me a Luddite?
In the way that every time I come across some mutt user it's always in the context of bitch bitch bitch line wrap bitch bitch bitch 80 colums bitch bitch bitch html formatted.

For my part, I'm sick of people bitching about my posts just because I don't cater to their fetish for 1980's technology.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a luddite, Stallman.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think many here feel that HTML is unecessary in email. I agree.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

In what way does my "influence" using mutt prevent you from using Thunderbird?

Suppose some [former] Windows users asks you to tell him what's the absolutely best email client: "mutt, of course. In order to use it, you must learn some umpteen text commands and type them. No mistakes: it makes you waste time. Yeah, you can use [Thunderbird|Kmail|Evolution|Wathever] and just read your mail. But, it's soooooo lame!" I think that's the point the parent intended to stress.

For that matter, in what way does my using mutt make me a Luddite?

Do you know what luddite means in the first place?

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Henk Poley]

I beg you pardon, but you do sound like a troll now. And.. KFG posts a +3 comment about once a day.

Your latest comments seem rather firefull.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

He asked if using mutt made him a luddite

I responded that the mutt users I have encountered have exhibited luddite tendencies

Email has progressed to the point where most modern email programs hold the capability to handle either text or html formatting. The desire of a very vocal minority of users screaming for the majority to not use a useful feature is in fact a classic example of luddite behavior.

Your comparison of comment ratings sounds like someone who is more interested in conformity and groupthink than in honest debate or -heaven forfend- critical analysis of the prevailing (luddite) mindset.

enjoy your pong on your c64 all you like, but don't be surprised when your cries of "OMG U USED HTML" place you squarely in my killfile/spamfilters.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

Windows users asks you to tell him what's the absolutely best email client: "mutt, of course.

I would do nothing of the kind.

Do you know what luddite means in the first place?

Yes. The most clear example of "ludditeism" I've seen on Slashdot are those posts that say, roughly, "Sure, Windows sucks, but I don't want it to go away because it guaruntees me employment."

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg you pardon, but you do sound like a troll now. And.. KFG posts a +3 comment about once a day. Your latest comments seem rather firefull.

Is this the same Henk Poley from Memigo?

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

mutt can be considered 21st century, for sufficiently large values of 21st century (v 1.0 released October, 1999).

For my part, I suppose that I'm "sick" of people who do not differentiate what is and is not technology based on technology, or who determine the value of a tool by it's birth date.

I do not know if you fall into the former catagory or not (I recognize your name, but can't recall any specific posts I may or may not have taken exception to), but at the moment you are falling into the latter. It is a fetish for the new.

I find screws to be extremely useful objects, especially in combination with a screwdriver. You, of course, may please yourself and it makes no nevermind to me and I have no idea why my use of screws in any way interferes with your use of adhesives. It is likely, however, that I might take exception to a post of yours advising the use of adhesives where a screw is clearly called for.

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

Windows only goes back 20 years, whereas unix goes back 35.

The slashdot mindset is to enshrine the commandline tools (of thirtyfive years ago) just because they are the commandline tools of thiryfive years ago.

No, slashdot ludditism has far less to do with windows and far more to do with what the unix hater's handbook called "the cult of unix".

It's amazing that for being essentially a humor book they described that phenomenon so accurately; it's even more amazing that the sad cult is still thriving today on this very site.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

I'm posting from Windows.

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

I do not know if you fall into the former catagory or not (I recognize your name, but can't recall any specific posts I may or may not have taken exception to), but at the moment you are falling into the latter. It is a fetish for the new.

If I have a fetish for the 'new' it's for 'new capability', and new applications of technology. I understand what you mean by that term and I agree that favoring something new and unproven just because it is new is asinine indeed.

However, what I object to is the mindset that says that just because someone does not want to adapt a new way of doing things (eg being able to format email) that no-one else should be able to either.

As I've said, my gripe isn't with the existence of old programs and methodologies: it's with the fetishizing of them at the expense of new capabilities.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[RLiegh]

I'm posting from KDE

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go here for a definition.

Computers serve a purpose: get some job done. Perhaps you enjoy using yours the most arcane way. Most of people don't.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Oligonicella]

It doesn't friggin' matter, as long as one can post.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

However, what I object to is the mindset that says that just because someone does not want to adapt a new way of doing things (eg being able to format email) that no-one else should be able to either.

I'm afraid I haven't noted anything of the sort here, nor do I see where an accusation of ludditism for using grep addresses the issue, particularly when the most common Linux enviroments at the moment are KDE and GNOME, the majority of whose users never drop to command line.

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Henk Poley]

Yes, the same one.

I like diving into upfront-obvious little flamewars now and then. An old habbit of mine.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

I am already familiar with this reference, as well as a number of others.

Perhaps you enjoy using yours the most arcane way. Most of people don't.

I enjoy getting my work done the way I want it to be when finished, and the fuck over with as quickly as possible. Given certain ideal conditions I'll refuse to do any work at all and as far as I'm concerned the Luddites were morons, as anyone who is famliar with my posting history can attest.

Frankly, I advise you to quit your job and find something useful to do instead.

The majority of people who work in IT, by the way, are Luddites protecting their jobs and resisting any and all technological change that might threaten their position.

They often employ the dodge of obfuscating obsolescent technologies with new skins and technobabble to make it look like they are progressively adopting new technologies, when in fact they are often simply readopting technologies that were considered obsolete 40 and 50 years ago.

But at least them make 'em look shiney.

KFG

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[miu]

Well the problem is an attitude that shuts out the possibility of there being a problem for which locatedb or any other simple solution is not good enough or easy enough. The strength of UNIX is often that it encourages you to actually think about the problem and break it into easy to solve pieces as well as giving you the simple tools (and primitives to build new tools easily) to do pretty much anything with the your data.

So sure there is a problem with linux fanboys dismissing anything outside their worldview, but the tools and attitudes of UNIX are hardly ludism - they are still valuable and are still responsible for a lot of the real work that gets done in the computing world.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting from the loony bin

(btw, is that a euphemism for some canadian numismatic container or something?)

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have far too many luddites who have far too much influence and want to pretend it's still 1979.

What? Everybody who has mentioned find/grep/locate etc has been shot down in flames. How is that "luddites with far too much influence"?

And this idiocy is +5 Insightful?

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a large part of why linux isn't mainstream yet.

Maybe, but you're missing the point. Commands like these form a basis of literacy, which stands in stark contrast to your windows click-click-clickness that is so very similar to that boob tube you watch daily.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, the right tool for the job. I just like to get things done. For me, that happens to mean using certain tools - some of them command line - because they're the easiest (for me), and the most efficient (that I've found) tools for the job.

Really, I think the mindset that you despise (and also display yourself btw) is to bandwagon and troll, and call other people names when you don't agree with what they're saying.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[mabinogi]

people use command line tools because command line tools are _useful_
It is often far quicker to do something on a command line than to perform the same action via a GUI.

There is definite benefit in graphical tools, but just because something is easier to learn, doesn't mean that it is better - it just means it's easier to learn.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Anonymous Coward]

Knowledge has a trade-off: no knowledge is forbidden. For example, when you can read, you cannot look at some printed text and not recognize the words instantly. With knowledge perspective is lost, and it's easy to not realize that what is basic stuff for you, what you can do without thinking, is nearly magic for the average user.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[Taladar]

I have yet to find a useful use of HTML in emails. The only mails I get where HTML-Use makes sense (user wasn't just too dumb to disable it for his text which would look exactly the same in plaintext) are spam- and virus-mails.

Re:find/grep/index wtf?

[kfg]

. . .and it's easy to not realize that what is basic stuff for you, what you can do without thinking, is nearly magic for the average user.

Actually, being keenly aware of this is a good part of my stock in trade as a self employed educator. I have perspective in bucketloads and a knack for explaining things in simple terms, as well as an awareness that my job is to impart my knowledge to them, and not to show off my own. This of course also means that I'm keenly aware that part of my job is to put myself out of business as quickly as possible, since the primary knowledge skill to be taught is how to acquire knowledge without reliance upon a teacher.

I also get a certain amount of work from the other end of the spectrum as a "magician," but I always explain that magic is an illusion, as every ethical magician should.

I'm still somewhat at a loss, however, why the possession of advanced professional archana, to the point where I can often appear to do magic from the perspective of other IT professionals, makes me a luddite.

The primary difference between myself and the stage illusionist is that my archana is not secret, and I'm perfectly willing to explain, to anyone, just what went into the illusion so that they can repeat it themselves.

Although there may be a fee for my time.

As a professional invested with deep juju, however, I am also aware that the act of clicking on an icon is also a trick with some underlying deep juju to make it look easy. It's a very complicated mechincal trick, like making Diamondhead disappear. Once set up, anyone can do it, but it takes a professional to set it up and I can appreciate the work that that professional put into it.

Thus I am not at all averse to teaching people who I know are never, ever going to spend years learning slight of hand to work as mechanics. It's the right thing for them to do. To rely on personal skills that they do not, and never will, have, is to guaruntee trouble.

And where they make my life easier I'm perfectly willing to use mechanical illusions as well. But machines require maintenance, and machines are limited by their design and construction, and machines fail, and when they do if you don't have a deep understanding of the principle of the machine, well, you're stuck there looking at it all stupid like, like you see people by the side of the road looking under the hood of their car that no longer runs, or at their malware infested Windows desktop that will no longer run.

Possessing advanced professional skills is not at all the same thing as being Luddite.

Now, as it happens, I am an actuall hand knitter and spinner, so the Luddite comparison isn't entirely metaphorical in my case, but. . .as someone with some expert skills in that department I recognize those skills as being something of an affectation. The knitting machine is a wonderful device, and fuck all if I'd want to sit around all day cranking out cheap K-Mart sweaters by hand in order to make a living if I knew there was a machine that could replace me.

The thing is, the best knitters and spinners (of which I am not a member) can still turn out superior product to the machines, albiet at handmade prices. These people are true craftsmen, and not simply bad machines.

And as E.F. Schumacher suggested it is the craftsman who is the only one who is in the position to determine what is a tool that aids his job and what is a tool that aids the people who sell the tools.

grep and mutt are the tools of a craftsman when used appropriately by a craftsman. They are neither obsolete nor obsolescent and have not been superceded in their function by graphical tools, anymore so than the power planer has made the violin makers hand scraper obsolete.

(This analogy is flawed, because in most cases it is actually grep that is the power planer and the graphical tools that are the home owners "t

Yes!

[Vicsun]

This is great news. I love gMail and consequently all other things google, but Google Desktop Search has been a disaster. I originally posted this in google groups, but I feel I need to post it here as well.

I won't even start complaining about google only supporting programs I don't use (AIM? IE? Outlook?), as it's still in beta and I represent a minority group anyway.
However I have several other problems...
1. When a a folder has the same name as my search term, google search will display *all* files within that folder. For example if I search for 'doom 3' it won't just list the files called 'doom 3' it will list *all* the files in the doom 3 folder. It would be much more useful if it would only display the folder once as a separate search result, and then only display files called 'doom 3'

2. Inability to only search for filenames *only* - sometimes, or actually most of the time, I want to find a specific file. I know I have created important.doc but when I search for 'important' I get a plethora of results featuring different documents / text files which have the word 'important' within them. Windows' search has done this nicely by giving me the ability to search for a 'all or a part of the filename' and for 'a word or a phrase within the file'. I also have the option to 'look in' which brings me to my next point

3. Inability to search within a folder - because sometimes it is extremely useful to look for *.mp3 in my very disorganized 'thereShouldBeNoMusicHere' folder. Or to look for anything at all in a drive different than C...

4. Wildcard searches - oftentimes I just can't remember how I've saved the file. Was my presentation called group4project.ppt or group4.ppt or G4.ppt? A simple search of *4*.ppt should find the file, where * is a wildcard. Currently I can't do that.

5. Un-indexing of files - I just moved 500 files from my desktop to my documents. GDS has re-indexed them in My Documents. When I search for file.txt I get two results only one of which is valid. Of course, I can manually remove the invalid result from the index, but I really don't want to do it 500 times. Even if I can somehow magically get all the duplicate files on the same search, I can only remove them 10 at a time.

Until google resolves those issues (and I certainly hope they do), the search integrated into Windows is more useful. I hope yahoo have made a better job than google on this one, I'm off to try it :)

Re:Yes!

[Neophytus]

No no no, it's GMail. Even Apple would agree, gMail looks pants.

Re:Yes!

[Vicsun]

Well, according to google it's actually Gmail :)

Re:Yes!

[damiam]

I'm not gonna claim that GDS is perfect, but you're not using it for its intended purpose. If you search for "important project" you should get all documents related to said project, including those in a folder with that name. As for your complaints 2,3, and 4, all of those can be done easily with standard Windows search tools. If what you want to search a filesystem for a filename, GDS isn't for you. GDS is designed to search the content of documents and return those relevent to your query.

Re:Yes!

[Neophytus]

Well, in asian regions, it's shemail. Oh... wait...

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

I originally posted this in google groups, but I feel I need to post it here as well.

You originally posted it to USENET. Google groups is nothing more than an interface to USENET.

Re:Yes!

[Jahz]

Vicsun, you make all good points, but why are you ranting here?

Im not huge fan of GDS, but your complaining about a free Beta product. Go drop Google and email and maybe some of that stuff will get fixed.

Also try to remember Google's target audience for GDS is not the /. ers. Sure, it *could* be with a few major changes, but that's for Google to decide. If they wanted nerds, they would have released a linux version, or at least OSX.

I tried GDS out on my Winxp pc a few weeks ago and thought it was cool, but overall I was unimpressed. In my case, I know the exact -- or close to it -- location of all my important files, my thousands of MP3's and hundreds of movies (all ordered heirarchally). GDS was useful, but only on rare occasion. I didnt think it deserves the CPU cycles or precious tray space.

With that being said, I have installed it on my parents computers and recommend it to less technologically inclined people. Its perfect for them. After all, thats all they need.

As for Me? Ill stick with my familiar old friends, find/locate and grep.

Re:Yes!

[phunhippy]

your absolutely right,

I use google desktop search for emails in outlook for work.. it finds days olds emails and sorts em by thread in seconds while outlook takes minutes.. even better i can click reply to all in google search response and it spawns an outlook email with all the contents required.. its a huge time saver and i'll never use the shitty outlook search feature ever again!

thanks google!! keep on rocking!

Re:Yes!

[trifster]

If you are tied to outlook email for your job GDS is the best thing EVER in search. I would send Google $1000 for this tool. I can search through my 3GB of email's in seconds instead of hours. I have probably already saved 3 or 4 hours of work thanks to this tool.

Re:Yes!

[Skim123]

Have you heard of/used Lookout? It is a tool for indexing Outlook files (and is free). I tried out GDS, but reverted back to Lookout b/c Lookout can also index files on the file system that I specify, like I can say, "Index .cs files in this directory," and it will work, whereas GDS doesn't (yet?) support this. Google's UI is a lot nicer, but Lookout lets me get what I need done. Also, MS is supposedly going to be coming out with a Desktop Search of its own, which, since they bought Lookout, will hopefully be an improved version of Lookout.

Re:Yes!

[nml]

I originally posted this in google groups, but I feel I need to post it here as well

apparently you feel the need to post it repeatedly.

You don't like GDS. We get the point.

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the fact that it has a huuuge RAM overhead. Don't know about you guys, but it has fucked up my work PC so much that I've had to remove it.

Locate can't search within files!!!111oneone!!11

[Anonymous Coward]

So please sir tell me how I can search _inside_ of text files, pdfs, word processor files, emails with locate.

Oh, I can't, thanks for your relevant post then.

Native to Windows?

[oniony]

Yahoo's is native to Windows and Google's isn't? Eh? Eh? Google's is native too, it runs as a Windows process, indexing files and running searches.

If they mean the user interface is a Windows app rather than a web client then, yes, but who cares? That's not that bit that's doing the work, that's just rendering some results. It may mean Yahoo will be able to take advantage of some more advanced controls, such as listviews, but Google has already proven with Gmail that it is able to kick out a pretty convining web application so I wouldn't cite that as an advantage.

grep/locate/etc is fine but...

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't exactly the same. In a desktop environment, there's times where you need a document, music file, movie file, etc. You might not know the filename, only some keywords in the file. With something like Google Desktop, you can preview the contents of the file right there and click something to immediately open the application that supports that filetype. Also, Google is continually watching what files you are opening, moving, deleting, etc. This means that the database is updated instantaneously.

Having a cron job is nice, but it just doesn't cut it when you are interested in finding things you did or installed 2 hours ago. Personally, I would be fine having no home directory structure. Any desktop stuff like docs, music, etc. could be automatically sorted for all I care. I just want to be able to have a little search bar somewhere on my DE that I type in a word and POOF it's there. Of course, this I-don't-care-where-it-is attitude doesn't work for compiling or generic console work. It's wonderful for a DE, though.

Do you yahoo?

[cbr2702]

Do you remember the old adds of "Do you Yahoo"? Yahoo put a lot of effort into branding, but didn't do nearly as well because their search just wasn't as good.

Re:Do you yahoo?

[Fallen_Knight]

old? they are on TV right now lol

Re:Locate can't search within files!!!111oneone!!1

[ilmdba]

he was pointing out a better solution, for the original poster's stupid: " Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...." comment. which makes the comment fully relative.

WinFS

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs these tolls now that WinFS is coming out?

After all it's going to be released soon, with Longhorn, wich is due 2005, eh 2006, eh 2007, oh wait, it will not be relesead with Longhorn but shortly thereafter, no, not really, but there will be some kind of a beta ready shortly after Longhorn ships.

Never mind, I for one welcome our new search machine company powered desktop indexing overlords.

Re:WinFS

[Anonymous Coward]

WinFS, if it ever gets to performing well enough to use and solves all the locking issues (not to mention clustering ones, if Microsoft ever figures out how to do clusters), will be using search techniques implicitly to get things indexed at some level. It certainly will not make sense to update fulltext indices every time you close a file. (In fact some unix style programs that open and close files once for every line of text in them could make such a scheme ludicrous indeed.) So the indexing will have to be handled by daemons running off to the side filling in database indices. The other amusing thing is going to be how the devil WinFS figures out what the interesting characteristics to index are for all those files. Leave it up to users and all 3 who can figure it out for themselves and want to bother taking the time can go to town. The rest of humanity will do something else, and probably wonder why much simpler filesystems blow the doors off WinFS for performance. Or if only a few characteristics get indexed...maybe a few security attributes and some very very very broad content categorizations,...the thing might stay usable, but the indices won't be all that useful.

Mark my words...Microsoft has now gotten far enough along in its builds to realize these problems and to begin to see that there are no schemes they have invented which begin to even address them. They will either abandon WinFS after a decent interval, or (more likely) see if they can steal some classification ideas from the likes of Google and others and see if indexing THOSE will get them anything useful that doesn't involve tons of hand indexing. If Google and others have any design patents, they might do well to ensure they are not violated by a belated effort by Microsoft to avoid admitting failure on this one. Evidently there have been experiments enough to conclude that full text indices are not useful enough in the real world for real customers to be worth the bother. I hoped otherwise some years ago when I did a design for an insert that would do such filesys mods, but experiment is the test of preconceived ideas here. Lots of uses of filesystems after all do NOT need to do massive indexing, and bringing it in for all operations is a performance gamble that (evidently) even limiting to one directory tree does not sufficiently contain the hit.

There may be some massively new and wonderful indexing paradigm brought in. I think it more likely to come from Google or other search folks than Microsoft. A search engine filesystem must satisfy a good many more constraints to be acceptable than must a simple search engine. It is also on the whole much harder to get working, much less get right. - gce

Filename search for Windows?

[eMartin]

I just want a fast filename search for Windows.

I don't care about content, since most of the files I work with don't have searchable content in the first place, and I give them useful filenames anyway. I just forget where they're saved sometimes, or want a quicker way to get to them.

Even with indexing turned on (does that help with filename searches?), Windows takes 2 or 3 minutes to search all my drives by filename only.

I know there's Ava Find, which is very fast and does what I want, but the UI sucks, and AppRocket, which is also fast but isn't really a search tool as much as a launcher.

So, are there any others that work like the Windows Explorer search, but faster?

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[mfearby]

I personaly don't "get" the plethora of "desktop search software" currently proliferating around the globe. Purveyors of said software would have you believe it's the next killer thing, but personally, anybody who doesn't know - roughly - where they've saved something on their hard drive, probably doesn't deserve to find it anyway.

I would much rather see a Windows search that actually doesn't ignore filenames - such as .asp - in a search simply because Microsoft can not comprehend anybody ever wanting to search for them. I have had to install Agent Ransack (http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/) simply to do a "grep" on my ASP files. This sucks, Microsoft!

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[TheRaven64]

I don't know about XP, but in Windows 2000 the indexing service doesn't integrate with the standard find command in explorer, you have to run it from MMC. You may also have to disable the service (I can't remember it's name) which restarts services it thinks are using too much memory. I had a problem with 2K where the indexing service would start running (consuming a lot of CPU), get to about 50MB of memory usage and then be restarted by this service (at which point it would start indexing again). Failing that, I believe that locate works well in cygwin.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[jayloden]

Agent Ransack is a free program that spanks the XP search tool, and has the functionality you want. I don't use windows anymore, but when I did, this is what I used. It also has the ability to integrate into the shell a little so it's conveniently accessible, e.g. from the "Search" start menu item.

I think that may be what you desire for a Windows search tool.

-Jay

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[gmajor]

I was about to post a blurb on Agent Ransack before I came across this post. Agent Ransack is awesome and very quick. I haven't tried Yahoo's tool yet, but Agent Ransack has set my expectations high.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[spongman]

damn, it's so simple on windows it's funny so much fuss is being made about this now:

1. start the indexing service, wait for it to index your drives.
2. search (Win-F), and prefix your search string with "!"

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[esharp]

Try this:

http://www.uku.fi/~jmhuttun/english/softwares.shtm l

The gui program looks just like Windows. Works great.

Re:Filename search for Windows?

[MikeBabcock]

If you're using XP, say yes to "turn on indexing to make future searches faster".

If you're using Office, turn on the fast find feature, edit the properties to include all files, then use the "open office document" UI to find your files.

For all others...

[Anonymous Coward]

There's htdig, or for a slightly better experience: iSite/iSearch.

dont need it

[Anonymous Coward]

i keep all my archived documents, email, and other info in a directory and catagorized in sub directorys within my directory, same with photos all catagorized so i can find whatever i need without the need of special search tools...

if you keep it organized from the start you dont have the disorganized mess to search thru in the first place...

Re:dont need it

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought I was the only one.

When my co-worker showed me the tool and commendted that it was pretty nifty, I agreed. Only to realize later that I have never actually had to use it. I may sometimes need to search the contents of files in a certain directory but that's done better with win search. F3. And I find what I need very fast. :)

But considering I have only seen one other person that organizes their files properly like I do, I think the existence of such software might actually be justified.

Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement it

[melted]

Since nowadays everyone and their dog are releasing desktop search engines, here's the thing that can give a commercial/technological advantage - implement plugin mechanism for searching other file types. I'd kill to be able to search my Thunderbird mail archives, yet neither Copernic, nor Google will do this, because they only understand MS email clients. Same applies to my digital camera files. I always make sure I attach IPTC metadata to them to desicribe roughly where and when the picture was taken, and what's on the picture. Current desktop search engines simply ignore this.

Re:X1 Software and Website

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if we're talking alternatives then check out Copernic http://www.copernic.com/ A lot better than Googles deskbar - especially if you're moving your files around.

Personally Leet

[buddha42]

Y'ever notice how whenever a person ends a newsgroup/forum/bullettinboard post with "Personally I..." it is always some kind of "look how amazingly fucking leet I am for using this hardcore way of doing things" type bullshit?

Personally I think its retarded.

Re:Personally Leet

[northcat]

I was saying the same thing to myself...

Re:Personally Leet

[SirTalon42]

Personally I think it was a joke.

Re:Personally Leet

[DJCF]

Personally, I completely fucking agree.

Re:Personally Leet

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, you're taking it too personally.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Copernic

[Khuffie]

Copernic already does everything this does, for free. It also searches web history, and supports Firefox.

Re:Copernic

[egoots]

Not entirely true.

Copernic doesnt support some of the file formats that X1 does including zip files, wordperfect files...

For more discussion see http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?t=1014&highligh t=copernic or for a discussion of X1 vs competitor see http://forums.x1.com/viewtopic.php?t=1014&highligh t=copernic

Note the dates on some of the earlier messages may be referring to older versions of both products.

Re:Copernic

[vikman]

It also doesn't support Thunderbird mail. It doesn't seem to be able to index firefox unless firefox is set to be your default browser.

Re:Copernic

[FrenZon]

Copernic doesn't seem to index the page-content of your browser history, only the URLs.

Not that the GDS does such a great job of it - sometimes it just plain misses pages, no matter how many times I revist them.

Re:Copernic

[gadwale]

Advantages of Copernic:

1. Google desktop search is strictly not for commercial use (For commercial use, you need to buy a Google appliance) (I wrote to them to find out if this prohibits any use in a commercial setting such as on an employer's computer and they did not reply)
2. Google desktop search does not index PDF files
3. Google desktop search does not do partial word matches (huge disadvantage when you have filenames which are just concatenated words with no spaces)
4. n GDS, you get to exclude folder that you do not want to index, in Copernic, you get to include folders that you want to index. I prefer the "index only when asked to do so explicitly" option.
5. GDS will not index mapped network drives except for files that you actually open and use after installing GDS
6. Unlike GDS, Copernic will index outlook email attachments also
7. Copernic gives a real time preview of the matched area as you highlight each search result line

I am sure GDS will be a great tool someday. For now, Copernic offers better options. And now that GDS is here, Copernic is free! Competition is always good for the end user!

-Adi.

Re:Copernic

[Perky_Goth]

interesting... thanks!
misses out on quite a few extensions, unfortunatly... ah well... i'm just being lazy by not going completly linux anyway.

Re:Copernic

[Anonymous Coward]

I've just uninstalled copernic after trying it out for 2 weeks.

For that 2 weeks my pc would just lockup within 10 minutes of starting.
In the end, I uninstalled it to see if Copernic was the problem, it was.

My guess is the scheduled indexing was somehow killing the pc (winxp-pro sp2). I would not recommend copernic.

Yahoo DID NOT RELEASE a new search tool

[Anonymous Coward]

Argh...

Yahoo! Releases Desktop Search Tool

No they didn't. The FIRST line of the article is "Yahoo! has licensed the X1 search software for Windows..." Later on the article says "The product will be called Yahoo! Desktop Search, and according to Jeff Weiner, head of search for the megaportal, will eventually extend to web searches too." (emphasis mine)

How the hell does this get turned into a released product?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Shouldn't This Be Here Already

[geoffrobinson]

It never ceases to amaze me but sometimes I'll use the current Windows search option, looking for something I already know is there. Many times it can't find it.

I would be happy with an accurate version of grep (which I know I can get for a Windows box), let alone a fancy search tool.

More spyware vs.spyware

[BestNicksRTaken]

Just this week I was reading about how spyware authors are fighting against each other, and now Google and Yahoo are doing it!

I won't even install the Google Toolbar, there's NO WAY I'm installing something that searches my hard disk and feeds the results *via a remote server* to my browser!

What's wrong with find . -name '*pr0n*' ?

Re:More spyware vs.spyware

[aardvarko]

Your ignorance betrays you. Google Desktop Search doesn't rely on a remote server to provide Desktop results; it installs an ipfilter that intercepts queries to google.com/search and injects Desktop results into it. Direct searches against the Desktop engine are provided by HTTP connections to localhost.

Clearly, the ipfilter solution is a bit of a hack, and raises other concerns - but did you really think that Google has both the ability and the desire to transfer store gigabytes of information from your workstation?

Now that you're done with that tinfoil hat - mind if I keep it? I need *something* to wrap this hot dog in. Damn ketchup's going everywhere.

Re:More spyware vs.spyware

[secolactico]

feeds the results *via a remote server* to my browser!

Eh? Doesn't it creates a local server to feed you the results? I thought that's how it worked and that the remote results (from google's site) are proxied thru said server.

If it's as you say, then that's a serious potential security breach.

desktop.google.com doesn't clarifies it.

I have a Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

Well.. I feel sorry for you guys.
I have a Mac.

Searches were fulltext indexed since .. oh I forgot, around 1998 I guess..

The filesystem was indexed and searches instantaneous since.. hmm 1984.. something like that, when HFS was born.

Indexation with metadata and instant index (when u add files) since hmm.. ah. In 6monthes.

Dan Huard talks about this...

[Refusedb]

Dan Huard's Blog
He does a nice little article about this exact thing
Ask Jeeves and Micro$oft is comnig out with their own too :-\

My sig is a joke, dumbass [n/t]

[RLiegh]

/i.

Re:My sig is a joke, dumbass [n/t]

[Anonymous Coward]

If what you took from that is a joke, I think the term dumbass would be more applicable to yourself.

Re:My sig is a joke, dumbass [n/t]

[Anonymous Coward]

Then come up with a joke that's FUNNY.

Re:My sig is a joke, dumbass [n/t]

[Anonymous Coward]

How about you get a sense of HUMOR.

A great open source project...

[Goonie]

It wouldn't be hard to build a Linux tool to do this. There are indexing algorithms in the literature - heck, one of my undergraduate lecturers wrote the book on this stuff. You'd have a niced daemon or a cronjob that goes looking for new files (in specified directories - one great thing about Linux systems is the file system tends to be a lot more organised than Windows, where stuff gets put everywhere). You'd have a plugin system to extract plain text from the various file formats. You could then have multiple frontends - console, GNOME, KDE, and so on - in the GNOME case you'd probably integrate it with nautilus.

One thing you'd have to think carefully about is privacy and security; how do you stop a user finding stuff out about files they're not entitled to read?

I'd start it myself except that I have a thesis to do :)

Re:A great open source project...

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Plugin framework?

well, for unicode, maybe...but for ASCII, why not just use 'strings'?

Re:A great open source project...

[SirTalon42]

The KDE team has already started working on this and they are planning on it being one of the big features of KDE 4.0.

Re:A great open source project...

[CAIMLAS]

I talked about this with a friend a while ago.

It'd be fairly trivial (a couple afternoon's worth of work for a skilled and experienced scripter) to make something which works better than the combination of the unix file tools (slocate, find, file, grep, etc.). In essence, you'd use those tools in conjunction with perl and a mysql database. You could either have a series of scripts do direct db manipulation, or you could have a daemon which transverses the db communications for the per-user script.

It could probably be done fairly easily without infringing on permissions, too - just do a sanity check to make sure the files are in $HOME. In linux, it's unlikely that anyone would sanely have much data outside of $HOME. I s'pose you could write it so that someone could configure the daemon to index the files in (say), /data or /raid5 as well fairly trivially, without infringing on the files in /home/ that don't belong to them. Then, simply have a seperate database for each 'index source', and a specific user could be allowed to search multiple sources.

As far as the files in /etc, /var, etc. - they're fairly static and all fairly standard per distro. No need to index them.

I'd undertake the project myself, but I really don't know how I'd go about categorizing data so that a person could easily find the files with specific text. Would it actually involve indexing the entire textual content of a person's $HOME/source? That's the only thing I can think of, and even then it seems like it might be a little slow/tedious. Any other ideas?

I'd love ot have such a tool...

Re:A great open source project...

[varadhan]

Beagle, (http://www.gnome.org/projects/beagle) is one Opensource tool that does address these issues. In a sense, yes, all the textual content of a person's $HOME is indexed. The way it is been [re]indexed, the indexing engine, the integration system, the query interface, hit-list generation et al determines the true capability of such search tools/framework.

Beagle uses
i) Inotify - a kernel patch for generating filesystem notifications - this patch enables beagle to immediately "re-index" things that changed in the filesystem
ii) Lucene - one of the best Opensource indexing engines
iii) D-Bus - message/event based IPC mechanism - with which beagle can seamlessly integrate with any application


Though beagle is just an infant, it does work fairly well. Checkout the above URL to know more about it.

Beagle-0.0.4 is just released and it is almost stable now.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[revscat]

Since nowadays everyone and their dog are releasing desktop search engines, here's the thing that can give a commercial/technological advantage - implement plugin mechanism for searching other file types.

Next version of OS X, probably coming Q1 2005. Metadata will be integrated into the file system, and authors will be able to describe their own metadata to the OS.

Yay.

Stupid news poster

[northcat]

Apparently Yahoo's version is native to Windows, and thus faster than Google's, but less portable.

No. The article doesn't say that. Read it again. The news poster twisted the words to make google look good. For once why can't people just agree that someone has done something better than google?

For the morons among us who don't understand what I am saying: the /. summary says that yahoo is faster because its a native application, but the article says that yahoo is faster and its a native application offering more benifits, not because. Do the deduction yoursel. (BTW, I refuse to believe that someone can be stupid enough to do this out of mistake.)

Re:Stupid news poster

[Darkon]

<DUMB QUESTION>
Why is GDS not a native application? Is it written in Java or something?
</DUMB QUESTION>

Re:Stupid news poster

[Anonymous Coward]

"... has the huge advantage over Google Desktop Search of being a native Windows client."

Not a dumb question at all. It's completely unclear to me as well what he means by GDS not being a 'native Windows client', nor what the 'huge advantage' could possibly be.

Of course, it may be worth noting that Andrew Orlowski has been running a vehement anti-Google campaign for some time now...

Re:Stupid news poster

[MikeBabcock]

It seems that GDS isn't a native windows app (according to the writer) because it is actually a webserver app running in the background that you interface with via your browser, much like Google itself.

As such, it doesn't allow some of the bonus features you get out of programming in the MFC, like extra bugs and crashes and misery trying to keep track of callbacks and validation.

Email clients are tuned....

[oliverthered]

No there not, I don't know a single email client that keeps word indexes of all you email to provide near realtime results. (well except maybe gmail).

I should imaging that doing a grep on /var/spool/mail/mymail would be about as fast as using the email client to do a search. (longer than 2 seconds less than 10 minutes)

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[Bullet-Dodger]

Apple's Mail.app does that. It's very fast.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[Anonymous Coward]

so out of 20 email clients to actually index your data.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[LWATCDR]

Sounds like a great thing to add to Thunderbird.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[Taladar]

I don't know about you but since I let my Mail-Program sort my Emails I never have to search for anything in them. I save Attachments when I get them in the appropriate place on my harddisk and email-content (almost) never contains anything I need more than a week later.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[oliverthered]

I use email for work tracking , ideas, sketched, todo lists etc... So about 10% of my emails are from myself.

I also frequently share my email directories so that others can have access to the information people have sent me etc.... Personal email stays in my inbox, everything else is accessible to various user groups in the company

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[oliverthered]

go on then, or at least raise a bug.

I'm currently too busy sorting out the less obvious things in OSS.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[LWATCDR]

Actually I was wondering if that might not be a fun project to try and take on. I just do not know it a Plugin would work or would I have to put it in the core code.

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[oliverthered]

Ok, I don't know thunderbird so I don't know where plugins can hook into the process but what you'll need to do is this...

1: Create a btree/leaf style index for the data, you can use SQL light for this if you want.
2: Put a hook in places where mail is either added, removed, or modified. Either write a plugin, if you can put a hook here, extend the plugin api so that you can, or put a patch in the core code.
3: use the hook to add, remove data from your btree.

I would suggest indexing all the words (with very common words removed) so you get a table with a unique emailid contains wordid.

Then when a user searches lookup wordid in the words table and then lookup the email containing the words.

This should provide almost instant email searching for thousands of emails.

I'd nail the search,index engine first using any old files and then do the thunderbird intergration. ...Have fun...

Re:Email clients are tuned....

[LWATCDR]

"1: Create a btree/leaf style index for the data, you can use SQL light for this if you want."
I would think a hash would be a better choice. B trees are more efficient if you need to produce ordered lists as well as searching. Hashing tends to be more efficient for the none ordered data.
A second hash based on soundex might also be a good plan so if you misspell a word it can find near misses like Google does.

Have you used linux?

[oliverthered]

Tools ,find file.

Re:Have you used linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the most unhelpful statement you could've possibly come up with.

1. What desktop environment? Gnome, KDE, XCFE, or other?
2. Are you even talking about a menuing system somewhere, in a graphical environment?
3. What the fuck?
4. What the fucking fuck!?

Re:Have you used linux?

[oliverthered]

1. Hey it works with at least one of them, go find out which one, it's not like you couldn't type linux 'find file' into Google and come up with 1000 different ways of doing it, so I support the answer is every environment.

2. See, I didn't even have to tell you, is it genius day of /. or what!

3. If you put you finger in the electric socket it helps smooth out the RF generated by you pc, try it. Hope that's a little more helpfull, You do know what the word most means don't you, are you onw of those God lovers?

Re:Have you used linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

cat search.sh
#/bin/bash

echo "looking for" $2 in $1

for i in $(find -iname $1); do
# echo $i
foo=$(cat $i | grep $2 );
if [ "$foo" != "" ]; then
echo $i;
echo $foo;
fi ;
done;

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[Anonymous Coward]

Given Google's plan for not being evil, they might appreciate any help on that.

I mean if someone wrote some code to split open thunderbird files and parse them and some simple search and sent it to google, they might just incorporate that into their code and index thunderbird stuff along with all other folder like c:\documents and settings\local settings\user1.homecomputer.thepersonalone\tempora ry internet settings\activex\downloaded from the web\the ones marked safe\the ones with activex scripting\<256 more characters>....

Plus if you comment enough on their feedback page, I'm sure they'll listen just like they fixed support for safari soon enough. :)

I didn't know

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

I didn't know Richard Stallman wrote articles for Slashdot.

Re:yay more spyware

[PornMaster]

Search for tinfoil hat on Yahoo... your hair is kind of messy in the photo that comes up.

pdf read library

[edsonmedina]

By the way, does anybody know of any good lib that allows to read text from PDF files?

I've been trying to scratch that itch on my linux desktop for a while... Maybe it's about time.

Re:pdf read library

[Anonymous Coward]

in debian the package is xpdf-utils: /usr/bin/pdftotext

Just to clarify...

[pseudochaotic]

That was a joke. See, because it's a really hilariously stupid thing to do.

*NIX GDS Clone: Baagle

[Anonymous Coward]

http://floatingsheep.com/baagle.html

Baagle Desktop Search is a work-alike for Google Desktop Search. It is a self-contained integration of various third-party components (Swish-E, Perl, a number of document converters) to provide an integrated web-based desktop search. No web-server is required.

learn your UNIX tools (locate)

[jeif1k]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Try "man locate" and "man updatedb"; that's been around forever. It probably already gets updated nightly on your computer (that's why your disk starts making all that noise early in the morning).

If you want to search for content, you can combine it with grep and xargs:

$ locate .tex | xargs fgrep something
...
$ locate .tex | xargs agrep foobar
...
$ locate foo | grep -v bar | xargs grep something
...
$

More complicated pipes involve "file", "perl", "awk", etc.

Re:learn your UNIX tools (locate)

[sootman]

And the bonus that some (many? most?) unicies actually use 'slocate', i.e. secure-locate, so Bob won't see Sam's porn when he issues 'locate paris'

my problem with locate is that if I try to combine it with 'rm' to delete tons of files, like 'rm `locate .txt`', I get 'argument list too long.' Any way around that? (Yes, I'm too lazy to google for and test solutions. just thought I'd ask since I'm here.)

Re:learn your UNIX tools (locate)

[jeif1k]

Geez, the solution is right in the posting you responded to: use "xargs". Read the man page; it's one of the most useful commands of the UNIX command line.

Re:learn your UNIX tools (locate)

[sootman]

Sorry, but not having seen xargs used*, I didn't recognize that it was the solution. So, if
rm `locate foo`
gags from too many arguments, then try
locate foo | xargs rm
?

* heard of it, but thought it did something else, so it didn't register when I saw your post.

checking for content

[jeif1k]

That's what "xargs" is for:

$ find . -type f -print | xargs grep foo

You can also search on both, or do more complicated things:

$ find . -type f -print | xargs grep -l foo | xargs grep bar

You may want the "-0" flag if you have file names containing spaces (this should be cleaned up some time, but it's nearly 30 year old tradition):

$ find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep -l foo | xargs grep bar

Yahoo Desktop Search

[Anonymous Coward]

doesnt this infringe on a patent somewhere?

Other Utilities...

[Anonymous Coward]

I found this to be one of the best out there and is worthy of some geek appeal. Great indexing and functionality.
http://www.dtsearch.com/

Re:X1 Software and Website

[David Hume]

Well, if we're talking alternatives then check out Copernic http://www.copernic.com/ A lot better than Googles deskbar - especially if you're moving your files around.

ARGHHHHHHHH!

I made a critical, and stupid, mistake in my original post. I assumed that people would RTFA. I am not talking about alternatives. I mentioned the X1 Software site because Yahoo has licensed the X1 search software for its new desktop search engine. From the article:

Yahoo! has licensed the X1 search software for Windows from tech incubator Idealab, in an attempt to compete both with Google's browser-based desktop search download, and the current leader Copernic.

See Yahoo! gives away free desktop search.

My point was that people can try out the software right now.

X1 Website

15 Day Trial Version

Lucene

[jeif1k]

Actually, there are already several open source text indexing engines. Lucene is pretty popular. Putting a user interface and a plug-in architecture around it is not so difficult. The main problem with it is that it's written in Java, but it can be compiled with gcj and the UI could be written in SWT.

Re:Lucene

[Tincan2k]

I'm working on an open source Lucene-based desktop search engine named Nariva http://nariva.sourceforge.net/. It has a java plugin-type preference framework for indexing files of particular types and the whole thing is open so you can write your own indexer. It's still beta, but it works.

Re:Dan Huard talks about this...

[SirTalon42]

KDE is coming up with their own for KDE 4.0.

Google Desktop privacy branded 'unacceptable'

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/15/google_des ktop_privacy/

It's the attitude I object to; not the tools. /nt

[RLiegh]

it can be

[jeif1k]

find / |grep' doesn't do any of that.... even "find / -exec grep foo {} \;" is much slower then an indexed database engine

Forget about the "-exec" flag; it is almost always the wrong thing to use, and it's dreadfully slow.

"locate ... | xargs grep ..." or "find ... | xargs grep ..." is quite fast. Not as fast as something that's indexed, but it's fast enough and always up-to-date.

That's probably the main reason people on UNIX just haven't bothered. But there are text indexing systems that you can use as well if you like.

Re:it can be

[Taladar]

The other main reason being that you do something wrong in the first place if you have to search the whole harddisk. In Unix you have something called a "home directory" for the purpose of storing files that are relevant to you. Everything outside that (except for /usr/share/doc and similar places) is just interesting to root. And with the tradition of using text formats in Unix searching can be quite fast without an index if you exclude binary files.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[jeif1k]

Metadata will be integrated into the file system, and authors will be able to describe their own metadata to the OS.

File types that benefit from metadata already have space for it (Word, OOo, PDF, MP3, TIFF, JPEG, etc.). But most people just don't bother putting anything there.

Adding metadata to the file system just causes gratuitous incompatibilities; there is no real benefit. Be tried it, Microsoft tried it, and Apple is trying it as well. In fact, this idea goes way, way back. In part, UNIX was intended to clean up this kind of mess.

Re:It's the attitude I object to; not the tools. /

[miu]

But even the attitudes themselves are valuable when not taken to an unhealthy extreme.

Take the example of local search - the linux fanboy thinks that just because he can find 'some-damn-anime.avi' in an index file that he has solved the problem, the windows 'solve everything' attitude makes the mistake of wrapping the whole thing up in a single program - capturing code and data in a mess that will only be useful in the circumstance for which it is designed. Between those two attitudes is one where we try to figure out how to keep the data about files and their contents simple and portable and let the front end programs (for input and search) evolve to fit the real world.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement

[Tincan2k]

Shameless plug: An open source Apache Lucene based search engine with a plugin mechanism for searching other file types: http://nariva.sourceforge.net/.

mod parent up

[anethema]

This is amazingly fast and usefull software. I use it on my NTFS 160gb drive. Its basically a gui version of locate, except the database updates in about 5 seconds, even the first time. I think it might even track changes to file locations in real time.

Searching is, as usual for locate, insant.

It also has a checkbox to replace windows find for winkey-F and F3 in windows explorer.

I cant go on enought about how fast and good this prog is. Much faster/better than even the *nix original.

Re:Mod parent up

[Ankh]

Thanks :-) lq-text is rather old now, so maybe a beagle-style rewrite is a better approach. I think probably it was about two or three person-years of effort back then, though, much of it in profiling and performance tuning, plus perhaps a year or so of maintenance. I don't have much time to write software these days :-( but would be happy to see others do so.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[revscat]

Adding metadata to the file system just causes gratuitous incompatibilities; there is no real benefit. Be tried it, Microsoft tried it, and Apple is trying it as well. In fact, this idea goes way, way back. In part, UNIX was intended to clean up this kind of mess.

LOL. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You're funny, though.

security

[Heisenbug]

One thing you'd have to think carefully about is privacy and security; how do you stop a user finding stuff out about files they're not entitled to read?

Perhaps it would simply work to store information about each file in a database with the same permissions as the file has. Then if the search runs with the user's permissions, which is probably a good idea, it could only read the index for files that the user could read anyway. In case the file permissions change between index runs, you could throw in a check that wouldn't show results that weren't currently readable. That part might be worked around, but would at least prevent accidental exposure.

Anything I'm missing?

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

The standard unixy solution would be to have a program that can build an index, and an interface to search it; then people could build indexes from applications (say, IDEs -- kind of like etags) or put a cronjob (running as themselves, no security issues) to build an index of everything they can read.

Already Done

[Anonymous Coward]

http://floatingsheep.com/baagle.html

Works on UNIX, uses Perl and Swish-E

Re:yay more spyware

[One Childish N00b]

What is it the tinfoil-hat brigade don't understand? Even if this program did report back to Yahoo, you could just block it at the firewall (if you run Windows without a firewall, you deserve everything you get) - even the most rudimentary firewall offers application-level permissions, and any program that doesn't have a valid reason for accessing the outside world doesn't get permission. Simple as that.

Feature by feature comparisons?

[shanen]

Interesting question about dealing with updated/deleted email, but I'd like to extend it to consider other features beyond email, such as identifying duplicate personal files (and email), identical files with different names, and maybe even identically named files with different content. (The last is mostly for digitical camera pictures, though I'm not sure what to do about resolving it conveniently, apart from my current use of seperate directories.)

Therefore, may I extend the question to ask if anyone has a reference to a good comparative review of these tools? The ones I know of are Google's and Copernic's, and I've heard a little about BlinkX (mostly in the old artical on /.), and now we have Yahoo's entry.

Re:Feature by feature comparisons?

[Anonymous Coward]

BlinkX can only handle 10000 (IIRC) files.
Google could not install on my computer (conflict with network encryption SW!!!! how come, I only want to search file on HD .... hum )
Copernic works very good, better feature set that I saw when looking at google web pages, like limiting search to one directory, only search some file types, different display formats.
All in all very good and recommended.
Is Yahoo better?

Why is this a bad thing?

[Ars-Fartsica]

At least they are recognizing someone else out there has more expertise than they do in this area. Its a win-win...Yahoo gets a competent codebase, and a small software firm gets a huge infusion of cash.

Re:Native to Windows?

[fupeg]

I wondered about this too. Perhaps GDS uses some part of the kernel of the mighty web search. If so, that is code written, and probably ridiculously optimized, to run on Linux. Perhaps Google intends to make DS for Linux and Mac as well? Or perhaps the author was only talking about the UI.

find?

[__aafkqj3628]

Sorry, is locate too high-class for you?

Just to follow up...

[Goonie]

As well as the projects people have mentioned, there is beagle for GNOME. They seem to be using a slightly different approach than the one I've outlined: they patch the kernel to notify the system when files are modified.

Re:Just to follow up...

[tetromino]

they patch the kernel to notify the system when files are modified.

That's because dnotify sucks donkey balls, as has been eloquently explained many times by anyone who has been forced to use that misbegotten kernel feature. If you want to have a clean file modification notification mechanism, you need inotify, which means either using kernel 2.6.8 or newer, or patching an older kernel.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have you know, my dog has not released anything in over a year! Between you and I, I think he's burnt out...

Re:It's the attitude I object to; not the tools. /

[Anonymous Coward]

Between those two attitudes is one where we try to figure out how to keep the data about files and their contents simple and portable and let the front end programs (for input and search) evolve to fit the real world.

That was tried. Company failed. Had to sell the OS to Palm.

Alternatives...

[Andrewkov]

This X1 stuff looks cool, but a bit expensive. I've been using a free Windows search tool, based on locate/updatedb with a nice GUI. Not perfect, and you can't search inside files, but still useful. You can check it out here.

Re:It's the attitude I object to; not the tools. /

[miu]

That was tried. Company failed. Had to sell the OS to Palm.

I'm not sure why Be failed - it could have wound up being what MacOS is becoming: a sucessful desktop UNIX. I think it had more to do with trying to survive on technical skill and pure hype in a strange and competetive market than a flat out failure of the technology.

Depends on what type of geek

[OldBaldGuy]

I'm a math-geek and X1 works just fine. searches tex, pdf's, ps, code files, yadda, yadda, yadda. When you've got several thousand articles on your drive it's just fine. Let's me spend my time on code I'm interested in.

As others have pointed out,

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

it's just X1 search. A showstopper for paranoids like me is that X1 calls home on startup. Anything indexing sensitive files shouldn't be calling out for updates, activations, or what have you without my explicit command.

Proof that Karma Points are harmful

[rjamestaylor]

• And.. KFG posts a +3 comment about once a day.

So that PROVES he's not a troll! Yikes.

Re:Here's an idea for whoever wants to implement i

[Anonymous Coward]

You have it almost right: you have no idea what I'm talking about.

But, hey, let Apple drive OS X into the ground just like they drove the previous version of MacOS into the ground.

Re:It's the attitude I object to; not the tools. /

[RLiegh]

I'm not sure why Be failed
I didn't follow it all that closely; but at least part of it (as I remember) had to do with a combination of wishy-washy decisions about supporting either the x86 or mac (where they started) platforms. Going back and forth on wether they would continue support or not.

There were other similar fumbles made too, as far as I remember.

The! Register! Invents! New! Droll! Headline!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh wait... sorry my mistake. They have used this one about a zillion times before.

While on the topic, I heard recently that The Register regards itself as a _news_ site. Could this be true? I always thought it was a comedy site. This could explain why the comedy's so mediocre...

Vaporware???

[gbulmash]

Yahoo promising such a program, despite licensing agreements, is still vaporware until a public beta is released, as far as I'm concerned. Announce all you like, but until your product is actually in my grubby hands, it's just an empty promise.

I use Google's beta now at work. For all the flaws people claim, it kicks the hell out of any internal search tools in Outlook. I have to manage an archive of thousands of e-mails, many with large attachments, and Google makes hunting down the right e-mail a matter of seconds when it could take minutes before. It's saving me hours a week as I often have to look up these old mails for customer service issues. It also rund plenty fast on a 2.0 ghz pentium laptop with 512mb RAM and a slooooow hdd.

I'd like it to support more mail clients like Mozilla, Thunderbird, and Eudora, plus the generic "unix mailbox format" which is used by many more. But that would be for my home use. I have to use Outlook at work and the Google Desktop Search is the *first* thing that has made me glad I'm using Outlook.

- Greg

Lucene with gcj

[Anonymous Coward]

has anyone actually done it ?

I tried, but never got past figuring out Ant.

Re:Lucene with gcj

[Anonymous Coward]

It looks like it; search on Google, I saw a couple of pages proclaiming success.

"don't have searchable content"

[Anonymous Coward]

There should be no un-searchable content. Even images can be searched.

Well, maybe encrypted files.

But besides that, all information should be indexed. If you don't care about finding it, why do you care about keeping it ?

quality yahoo software (or lack thereof)

[shaggz]

Has anybody here tried using yahoo's messenger program? It's just so damned slow and quirky and none of the flash features that make my friends like it so much have been ported to the mac, and on top of all that the whole thing is crammed to the hilt with ads and extra entirely unrelated services. Now they want to search your desktop. Maybe it won't be as bad as the rest of their software, but I doubt yahoo is capable of putting forward anything other than spammy immitations of other people's more decent software.

Re:quality yahoo software (or lack thereof)

[The MESMERIC]

yeah but Yahoo Webcam is much better than MSN.
Not that it runs on my platform but hey ... its much better.

[LU]N[UI]X in need of search

[j.leidner]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'....

That's almost a flamebait in the original post, because it's so utterly unprincipled, ineffective and inefficient.

• Ineffective: Most importantly, it doesn't actually search a term index, but you can only search for file names (so you have to know already what you're searching for). There is no good desktop search tool for UNIX that I'm aware of (although I've used SWISH-E to index plain text document collections, but that's still different from a tool intended to index whole directory trees for full-text search.
• Inefficient: The find/locate commands don't use an index. People below have proposed updatedb, but I doubt that uses incremental index updating, which can become essential if you run it once per night on a large machine. Full-text indexing is much more resource intensive than just indexing file names, so you want to be even more sure that when tomorrows cron job starts, today's will have finished.
• Unprincipled: You could actually find a pipeline of UNIX system commands that implement full-text indexing and search, but that's not a good way to do it. I am aware of the power and versatility of the pipe paradigm, but search is such a fundamental (pervasive, important) problem that it licenses a dedicated development.

Ideally, there'd be a search engine which is part of the operating system, and Microsoft has recognised this and has been working on it for quite some time now. It will be a major selling point of Longhorn, and I predict it will dramatically enhance Windows usability compared to Linux.

Unfortunately, the open source community has not recognised the problem as a whole, but I'm aware the people on the ReiserFS file system have ambitious future plans to include features in that direction (but that might come too late), and I wouldn't count on the likes of Yahoo/Google to deliver the ultimate UNIX/Linux search solution.

--
Try Nuggets , the first SMS search engine -- text your questions, get your answers from the Web.

Re:[LU]N[UI]X in need of search

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahem. And yours is not flamebait?

For Linux, there's Beagle. It's not done yet, but you can actually download and use it today.

Longhorn is also not finished, and you can't get a copy at all. And they seem to keep pushing the release date back, and removing features, so I have almost no idea when it'll be here, or what it'll do.

For comparison, Apple has Spotlight. It'll be in Mac OS 10.4, due in 2005H1. If you're a developer, you can buy a preview release to play with now.

So the biggest difference, to me, between Beagle and Spotlight and Longhorn is that Longhorn isn't available today at all, and has no ETA.

Seems to me that Microsoft is the one that's falling behind.

Re:Dan Huard talks about this...

[Refusedb]

Nice, but find is fine as it is

find / index

[lousyd]

Personally, I still like 'find / > index' in a cron script, then just grep 'index'...."

Aren't you so manly.

The purpose of a text retrieval system

[Ankh]

I released an open source text retrieval system about 15 years ago...

There are two main reasons to use a search engine rather than grep or other similar brute-force tools, even under the Unix operating system.

1. it's often orders of magnitude faster
   
2. it finds things that tools like grep can't find.

It's faster because searching an index generally means reading fewer disk blocks than scanning the data.

You could think of a text retrieval system as a cache that's pre-loade with every possible search. Of course, the biggest problem then becomes cache management. One often forgotten issue is security: can you find out what words are in files belonging to other users? This is sometimes called the "dead sea scrolls attack" because the scholars working on the DSSs refused to publish the texts, but did publish a concordance, and from this someone else deduced the actual text.

Security issues apart, try to search the works of Shakespeare for to be or not to be and you'll find no exact matches. First, there's a comma in the original (at least in the most common editions). Second, the first word should be capitalised. And in some electronic editions there may be a newline in the phrase. Any of these changes will defeat grep, although you can use case insensitive matching and change every space to a [^a-zA-Z0-9]+ to improve things.

A good modern text retrieval system will also support query expansion - e.g. sugegsting alternatives for misspelt words, and in some cases using a thesaurus to find words with similar meanings. Google also does query narrowing whereby possible meanings of words are eliminated based on other words in the query. For instance, if you look for Mass Ave you're unlikely to be interested in the weight of the Virgin Mary, and quite likely to be looking for Massecheussets Avenue in Boston. Many other features, such as preferring matches with the words in the right order but not discounting matches with a transposition, and of course the order in which the results are presented, all add up to whether a text retrieval system is useful or not.

Perhaps I should be honest here and admit that my own system didn't support a thesaurus, mostly because in 1989 it was hard to get a redistributable machine-readable one in a useful format!

Another reason to want a text retrieval system is that tools like grep don't handle non-textual file formats such as PDF, Microsoft Word, or even tar or zip archives containing text files. Grep can also give false matches by accidentally searching image files and program binaries.

I have no idea how good Yahoo's software will be, if and when it's released, nor how the current offerings under open source or Free desktops such as Gnome (Beagle) and KDE compare right now. But let's not dismiss it just because a less useful "solution" exists elsewhere :-)

Liam

Email portion doesn't seem to support Bat Email :(

[bigwavejas]

I noticed under the X1 options for email the only support it shows is for the mainstreem email applications such as: Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape and Eudora. Don't all self-respecting Slashdotters use TheBat? http://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/ Hopefully they add support for alternative email apps with future releases.

Does Yahoo's require Admin rights to run?

[Kagami001]

Google desktop search is useless to me because it insists on Admin rights to run at all.

Windows Indexing Service is useless to me because it can't index user-encrypted files (it runs as a single system servivce with a global index).

Can Yahoo's search be run in a LUA? Does it store the index individually per-user?

Re:yay more spyware

[Omniscientist]

lol that's hilarious because when you posted that my hair was extremely messed up

I don't like clutter.

[rice_burners_suck]

I don't understand what it is with all these desktop search tools. If I want to look for something, all I have to do is open up a browser and punch in "g searchphrase" and the results come up. What the hell is wrong with that? Now I need to have another piece of clutter running on the desktop???!!??!?!?!?!?!!!??!?!?

who cares ..

[laka21]

well... ya maybe the windows desktop search is a little slow, but is that the main concern now? what is the ratio of searching the internet to searching the desktop - about 1000000 : 1. The real race is in Net seaching (which is ruled right now by the one and only 'google'). The bottomline is that, for a search which even the most disorganized freaks dont use often, the current one is good enough. So get innovative and try to compete in the 'internet search' race. If you cannot do that, and instead you are trying to come up with something new,useful then this is NOT it.

Re:who cares ..

[adepali]

What are you people talking about... These apps search your disk for your own files, do you use google to search for text in your mails or your documents??

Uh?

[jotaeleemeese]

me@machine uname -a
SunOS machine 5.8 Generic_108528-27 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-5_10
me@machine
locate /bin/ksh: locate: not found

Re:Uh?

[nuintari]

I stand corrected, almost every unix system except sun's crap.

I say crap in jest, honestly its pretty damned stable, and ya have to respect that. Too bad sun management has its head up its own ass so far it can lick its own teeth.

Alternatives

[fxj]

try x-friend. it uses lucene as search engine and has a nice interface just like google. also it can search in pdf files which is pretty handy. and it runs on winxp, linux and macosx, as it is a java app. maybe THE killer app for java?

Re:Alternatives

[Anonymous Coward]

Try CollectiveCortex, a lot more powerful than x-friend. I tried x-friend and its windows service integration would keep crashing my pc!

Multiplatform desktop search, works on linux!

[s_bear100]

Found this one that runs on Linux as well!
Has some additional handy tools like web crawling, page monitoring, and an intelligent RSS news reader. The page re-ranking in the context search bit is fantastic, I have noticed it tends to lower the ranking of paid for results that really dont have that much relevance, nice!

Check it out at http://www.collectivecortex.co.uk

For more pople that would be good enough.

[jotaeleemeese]

If going mainstream means unnecessary bloat (like an intrusive, unsecure search utility most akin to a database), then yeah, cut me frm the mainstream.

Yahoo desktop search

[totallygeek]

When you use it does your system tray say, "Powered by Google"? I thought Yahoo used Google's search engine anyway...

List of all desktop search engines

[Anonymous Coward]

Good roundup of whats out there...

http://roosster.org/dev/index.cgi?PersonalSearchEn gines

I never loose files

[hey]

If I want to search thru my mail I use my mail program. If I want an old document I'll know what directory its in. I hardly need every file on my machine in some giant database!

Re:I never loose files

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the hell is a file that isn't tight? What kind of term is "loose file?" I've been using computers for 34 years, and I've never heard that term. What do you mean by it?

THE FIND / GREP THING IS A JOKE

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus people, how can you all be thinking it was meant seriously?

"It's funny. Laugh"

X1 - one of the 2 apps I miss from Win desktop

[uctpjac]

I have pleaded with X1 for a Linux version of their desktop search tool. It is one of the 2 apps I miss from the bad-old-days of running a WinXP desktop. What I really liked was this: emacs-search like, it produces answers to your queries as you type, providing immediate feedback as to whether you've got your search terms about right: when you start typing, the results list is long; as you keep typing, it shortens. You can stop typing when you have 5 or so results back, and check that they actually contain the record/file you're after. I have a reasonably good memory, but I'm very disorganised; so the real-time feedback allowed me to home in on information really fast. I've tried htdig to index my linux desktop, and maybe with lots of work it would become usable - but i don't see myself morphing it into anything as nice as X1. I look forward to trying the other systems metioned in this thread - maybe they'll get closer. Oh - and the 2nd app I miss? Microsoft Streets & Maps.

TRY OSX Search

[unicode]

If you are after lightning fast file name search, you can not go past 10.3 (Panther).

If you are after fast content search then try 10.4 (Tiger). Tiger is currently in beta, however it has a working search plugin architecture called spotlight.. Currently The system spotlight supports searching many formats, including PDF, which I noticed someone was requesting.

Google and Yahoos search programs sound good, however I am going to stick with Apples integrated solution, until someone makes something better.

Strange Observation

[Neo's Nemesis]

Go to yahoo and search for "Desktop Search Tool".
First link to come is this very page (go slashdot!)
after that there's information about google's, copernic's but none of yahoo's. strange that they themselves are keeping the news hidden/unindexed.

when searched for same on google, and it returns at least 1 link to x1.com

Re:'find / index' isn't the same thing.

[samhalliday]

would the GNU grep

grep -lR --binary-files=without-match foo /

not do the same thing? (here for text only files of course). granted it may be a lot slower than these new database driven technologies... but faster than using the find AND grep commands. on my system, for example:

time grep -lR foo ~/

takes 0m0.513s, whereas

time find ~/ -exec grep -l foo \{} \;

takes 0m12.755s. thats a x25 performance penalty.

parent was replying

[Anonymous Coward]

well the parent should be responding to comments at comment that's why we nest them in the first place.

The Wolfkin

I see MS has launched "Destop Search" today too

[contrapuntalmindset]

http://www.techweb.com/wire/ebiz/55301475 http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/

Lookout

[CryptoJoe]

I had to evaluate Lookout (bought my Microsoft) for work. Since I ran Google Destkop Search at home, I wrote a short comparison. http://cryptojoe.blogspot.com/2004/12/google-deskt op-search-vs-lookout.html Wish I would have known about yahoo at the time.

Mod parent up

[morgan_greywolf]

MOD PARENT UP.

put a GNOME front-end on lq-text, and you have something like Google or Yahoo desktop search on Linux.

This is *exactly* what the community needs.