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Desktop Search Engines Compared
nutterButter writes "After Google created a stir with its desktop search engine, other engines gained more awareness in the public eye. Slate did a comparison of them and Google was not their top pick; Copernic was. I tried it - and am quite impressed."
Sure, there's one coming out later this year. It'll cost $130, or $70 if you opt for the "educational discount."
The biggest use (and what makes it a necessity for me now) I have for a desktop search tool is searching for a webpage I partially remember visiting a few weeks ago, but need more information from. GDS indexes the content of all pages as you visit them, making finding them relatively easy - as far as I could tell (tested over half an hour), Copernic only indexed title and URL, which was of much less use.
A minor point for the geekier here - GDS can also be activated using quicksearch URLs from IE or Firefox, which is handy for those used to getting everything from one field.
Hello? What about the company that invented this category, X1? Yahoo's using them for their desktop search app, and they're considered the standard-bearer by many. Definitely the most feature-rich (250+ file formats, netscape and eudora mail support, etc. etc.)
I've tried these so-called "Desktop Search" apps like Google and Copernic, but they're all crap. If you want serious desktop search, get something like DTSearch (http://dtsearch.com/PLF_desktop_2.html).
Only problem is DTSearch is hella expensive at $200.
But if you've got serious amounts of text that you need to search (I use it to search through 80gb of text on an external HD), its the only way to go.
Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains.
The latest edition of the Beagle newsletter has just been released.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Wow. The timing on this article is uncanny. I installed Beagle yesterday, and I'm already addicted to it - it indexes documents, mail and web pages as they're accessed, and updates it search results in real time.
Actually, it CAN search inside of files, contrary to your post. The results can then be arranged by size, type, folder, date, etc. Isn't that enough?
A blog like any other.
Looks pretty sweet too.
Apparently it's a SQL Lite DB that stores Metadata.
Join the Free Software Foundation
As someone who works helpdesk...
:)
You, sir, are completely wrong
Users HAVE NO CLUE where they put their files... ever.
Now whether or not a search tool will help them find the files they save is another question...
WTPOUAWYHTTOTWPA
What's the point of using acronyms when you have to type out the whole phrase anyways?
It's called Mac OS X Tiger.
Actually, it is called Spotlight.
Which will be a part of Tiger, the latest upcoming version of Mac OSX.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Copernic's Privacy Policy reveals that, "Copernic Technologies, Inc. works with third parties that transmit advertisements to the Copernic Agent and Copernic Desktop Search product families and Copernic Meta."
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I have about 6 years worth (10 gigs) of old project files sitting on my hard drive. I use X1 and think its an absolute god send. Just type in a few keywords and X1 pulls up the file. I used to have to pour through a dozen levels of directories and rely on my rusty memory to try to find files.
I like DocYouMeant Hound http://myradus.com/. But, I know the guy who wrote it, so I'm a bit biased. :-)
Yes, you can move files with Copernic. You can drag them from the search result to a new location. Of course, it actually moves the file, and doesn't just copy it.
Jason Lotito
there's no reason to grep your entire damn harddrive for a single phrase. Use some degree of organization. The business world has limited use for someone who can't keep themselves organized.
finally - egrep will easily find patterns in all sorts of binary files. Creating a tiny little happy gui to search for things in your folders with DOCUMENTS (instead of searching your whole damn hard drive) is easy enough, if typing egrep "Thing I Want" * proves to just be too darn complicated.
Way to go, Mr Anonymous Windows Expert. The Indexing Service does everything these desktop search tools do, and has for many years.
I've used the free open source Wilbur from redtree.com for ten years now. Now that everybody's doing it, I can tell the secret.
Please, the Mac shareware developers practically invented this genre:
Launchbar (the first)
Quicksilver The current favorite, and free.
Butler About the same as Quicksilver, more features but not as slick.
Quicksilver also has the worst interface of any Mac app, ever.
You're an idiot. There, I said it, and will probably get modded down just for that. But, honestly, QuickSilver having a bad interface? Bullshit. Your description sounds like you just looked at a screenshot and guessed at how it works. It's functionally no different than LaunchBar, Cmd+Space and start typing in the box cleverly marked "Type to search".
Yes, it's a *slightly* different approach than LaunchBar, but if you closed your yes, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the two.
Don't become a regular here -- you will become retarded.
So for a practical example, I have about 120 collected pdf files of academic articles under filenames with the primary author and year. (I could put the title in there, but filenames between 16-25 characters seem to be reasonable.)
If I'm doing reading on a particular topic, I might want, for example, all of the articles related to Barry Wellman's work on social networks on the internet. The obvious way to get that is to list all of the articles that cite Wellman. This is probably not information that I want to put in the filename.
So, to try a naive example (which according to others here should work.)So in this case, grep spends about two seconds returning no results.
Now I could write a shell script that runs pdftotext on every file in my library, then grep the output. But pdftotext is expensive for one file much less a directory of 120 files:Thankfully, I have a document indexing application that does the work for me. A while back I set up swish-e to index almost everything in my home directory. So...The full-text index gives me 11 hits, in 1/20th of the time as a naive grep, sorted by score. (It missed one, primarily because xpdf respects copy protection while Copernic seems to be able to index through copy protection.)
Sometimes fulltext searching is useful, and egrep just does not work.