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Desktop Search Engines Compared

Posted by timothy on from the operating-system-handicapped dept.

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."

33 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Copernic... by tektek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Copernic is also the only one on TFA that can search Firefox.

  2. Linux anyone? by ewanrg · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux? Having Copernic rated #1 is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and Google is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and...

    I assume you get the picture :-)

    ---

    Yeah, I'm like this on my blog too ;-)

    1. Re:Linux anyone? by QuantumRiff · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No, its got a pretty interface. To be accpeted by the linux crowd, it needs to be "GREP" with a combination of C, perl, shell scrip, and awk. Oh, and better be availble in RPM, tar.gz, and .deb. And it surely better use MySQL as a backend, with apache as the gui (if your going to have one.) We unix geeks like to demonstrate our knowledge by always doing things the hard way!

      --

      What are we going to do tonight Brain?
    2. Re:Linux anyone? by ken_devon · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Linux anyone? by theantix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      To tell you the truth, I'm very glad that these sorts of companies don't yet write software for Linux. A free software solution like Beagle comes without spyware, doesn't send your information to their corporate masters, and doesn't shove ads down your throat or charge you money.

      Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today. It's almost a golden age now, knowing that the vast majority of Linux software is truly free libre software instead of the ugliness that freeware software will bring.

      --
      501 Not Implemented
    4. Re:Linux anyone? by rusty0101 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Actually, no they don't use a recursive grep on your hard drive.

      They use several filters to build an index of words in the various documents they have filters for.

      When you ask Google Desktop, Yahoo Desktop, or other search engines to find documents that might be relavent to your search string, they compare the words in your search string with the words in the index they created earlier. From that index, they then provide you with a list of files on your system ranked by whatever algorythm the developers came up with.

      If you happen to have a DVD ISO file on your system somewhere, copy it to a different partition to see how long just copying, not searching, that much material takes. It is not a non-trivial amount of time. Especially when you are looking to present a user with a list of matches in under a second.

      Indexing is not just running a variation of 'grep' against your files. It is collecting a list of words from each document, identifying those words that are not 'common' (if, and, but, the, or, a, I, etc.) and identifying where in the document those words exist.

      That way when you look for 'President Bush' on your hard drive, it can compare the proximity of the words 'president' and 'bush' and give a better match to those documents that contian both words, closer together. That way your disertaion on Teddy Roosivelt hunting in the deapest affrica will be less likely to come up with a match than your discussion of the relaventce of the first Gulf War to political dinners in Japan.

      There are a couple tools out there that provide some of these features for Linux. You can use ht://dig to build a web based interface. If you would rather be able to use either a command line search, or a web based search, you might want to look into Glimpse.

      Of course, this being Linux, dozens of people have taken a partial stab at doing this. You could probably work out a method from either the Learning Perl, or Learning Python books, as both are quite capable of building and maintaining indexes. The best part is that it would be optimized for your set of files, rather than just being a generic tool that you have to go out and find third party filters to make use of.

      Then again, what do I know. If you think running grep against /dev/hda is a good use of your time, more power to you.

      -Rusty

      --
      You never know...
    5. Re:Linux anyone? by dAzED1 · · Score: 3, Informative
      if every document you have is cached, then there are two copies of every document, which is a serious waste of space. I think what you mean to say is that its indexed, but I'm not going to answer all your questions for you.



      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.

    6. Re:Linux anyone? by dAzED1 · · Score: 4, Interesting
      I was poking him since he didn't understand. You don't understand either, but you're closer. As a dba, I'm quite well aware of how indexes work.


      If you're organized, then your docs will be on one general area. As such, running an egrep in there for a phrase really doesn't take much time at all. 20 minutes? hardly. A second, maybe 2. Try it some time.


      What it allows me to do is make my /own/ algorythm for what I want displayed.


      Is this practical, or even easily plausible, in windows? No. Does everyone know regular expressions? No. Am I saying that no one should use these tools? No. I'm just commenting on the poster that said grep couldn't do what these tools do - they were wrong.


      locate doesn't search your emails, nor let you know which files containt things, you could recursive grep, but that doesn't find stuff in pdf files, and takes up a ton of cpu.


      Locate - doesn't need to search my emails. gmail does that just fine. Egrep tells me what contains whatever I want. Can google's tool find files that have a line that starts with a number, has 2 words, then repeats the number again? No. Simple regex can blow away anything the google tool can do. I can most certainly find stuff in any binary or doc file, without taking up "a ton of cpu."


      See? not saying my way is better for everyone else. Just saying someone who says my way doesn't work, is wrong - my way not only works, its more powerful.

    7. Re:Linux anyone? by Tim+C · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today

      Of course they will. Like them or loathe them, the adware authors are doing it for money, and so target the OS with the largest install base (all other things being equal). Once Linux or MacOS has a more appreciable market share, they'll be targetted too.

      Yes, Windows is more vulnerable to remote/local exploits, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about trojans, malware-riddled software and other stuff that requires user intervention to get on to a system. If the hordes ever descend on Linux, so will the malware.

      --
      It's official. Most of you are morons.
  3. Apple's coming out with something like this... by bennomatic · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's called Mac OS X Tiger. If you've used iTunes, you know how good and how fast searching can be. It's going to be pretty awesome when it comes out.

    --
    The CB App. What's your 20?
    1. Re:Apple's coming out with something like this... by Ludraman · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Yeah, it's called Spotlight, and in Tiger will be in the top right corner of the screen. You can search your hard drive like you search your iTunes library, and it will even search in files for keywords. All in no time whatsoever. Rockin'.

      --

      -- Wanted dead or alive - Schrodinger's cat
    2. Re:Apple's coming out with something like this... by Shanep · · Score: 5, Informative

      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?
  4. history search by FrenZon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:history search by duncangough · · Score: 3, Informative

      Install your own proxy server and let that do the searching and indexing.

      Like this: Python proxy server - a proxy server, written in Python, that uses Lucene/Lupy to do the indexing and searching.

      --
      Suttree, a weblog about casual games development
  5. the main problem i had with google by jeff+munkyfaces · · Score: 5, Interesting

    is that i can only open the file i search for!

    i planned to sort out my music collection - so i searched for an artist - 87 results.

    can i select them all and move them to a folder in one go? no.

    for this kind of thing it's useless - i wonder if i can with copernic..

  6. How neccessary is this for home users? by TheWart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Maybe it is just me, but for home users, is a tool like this really necessary?
    If you do not put things in directories, and are really disorganized, I suppose it would be, but I suspect that most people are at least somewhat organized when it comes to computer files...

    Then again, my perception may be skewed, since most people I come in contact with who use computers a lot are my college friends, and they are all pretty computer literate.

    1. Re:How neccessary is this for home users? by savagedome · · Score: 3, Funny

      I suppose it would be, but I suspect that most people are at least somewhat organized when it comes to computer files...

      Like this??

      --


      Free XBox, PS2
    2. Re:How neccessary is this for home users? by GlassHeart · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I am pretty anal about where I put my files, yet over the years those habits and preferences do change. Thus, I might've used 'personal' in 1995 and 'prj' in 2000 to refer to personal projects. Whenever I switch machines, I don't always have the patience to restore everything (particularly stuff like archived email) from the old machine in the right places, especially if it's something as major as a Windows to Linux switch. Instead, the old stuff live in a tgz file somewhere.

      Would I ever need to search old email? Probably. Do I want to remember where every single email program I've ever used stores its mailbox files? Hell, no. If done right, these search tools can be really handy.

  7. DT Search by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  8. Some GNOME folks look to be working on it. by Chuck+Chunder · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Some GNOME folks look to be working on it. by artemis67 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Whoa, whoa, whoa. If you're talking about having your personal information ransacked, then Windows wins again!

  9. Re:Why is desktop search so hot? by almostmanda · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The search that comes with Windows XP is a)ungodly slow b)often unable to find what you need and c)only searches file names. It can't search within chat transcripts, e-mails, or documents. Even if it could, Windows search does a terrible job of arranging the results once they have been found. There is great potential to improve upon the current local search.

  10. Re:Why would anyone trust this? by Old+Man+Kensey · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Assuming you're the kind of user with privileges to install this on your computer to begin with, every application you run already has those permissions. Any program you run has the same permissions you have when you run it, unless there are admin policies to the contrary in place. So, these apps don't inherently represent any more of a security risk than the ordinary search built into your OS.

    So, do you trust your OS vendor? If so, why, exactly? For that matter, do you really trust your antivirus vendor?

    --
    -- Old Man Kensey
  11. Re:Why is desktop search so hot? by mOoZik · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  12. Re:Why is desktop search so hot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Every try using windows search to locate some piece of source code? Using Windows to find a document containing some piece of text is not very good. If you are just looking for a file named yyy or even *.jpg it is somewhat ok, but even then it has to traverse your entire directory structure.

    This means that if you want to find all mp3's on your in the twenty different file sharing programs, and didn't have the foresight to organize them all into one set of directories. Than windows is going to search every file and check if it matches the extension .mp3. That is going to be alot of disk access, so I hope you defragged your hard drive lately so that the File allocation table is all residing in one section, if not it is going to be awhile.

    The google search tool (and I assume others) keep an indexed structure of your files for fast and intelligent searching.

    It would be likely searching an entire SQL table for a record when really the record you want should be indexed to allow quick lookup.

    This may not be an issue if microsoft and Apple get their relational file systems implemented. I am pretty sure Microsofts system is far away though, although I think I heard apple and linux are closer.

  13. Newsflash by E+IS+mC(Square) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    slate is already sold to washington post. . and here

  14. Desktop search unnecessary by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Funny

    All desktop searches are redundant; well, under Windows at any rate.

    Simply use Google, which will have visited the web server on your compromised Windows PC- the same web server that is sharing everything on your hard drive with the rest of the world.

    I bet those Linux weenies are jealous now.

    --
    "Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
  15. oh shit by commodoresloat · · Score: 3, Funny
    GDS indexes the content of all pages as you visit them, making finding them relatively easy

    This is gonna make it really easy for your spouse to figure out what porn sites you visit....

  16. Re:Bias? by EvanED · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Even the sale of Slate notwithstanding, the journalistic independence Slate had was quite admirable on the part of MS; few companies would keep a news source like that on a looser leash.

    Slate was very critical of MS during the anti-trust trial, has been reasonably critical of their software (even going so far, as another user mentioned, as to reccomend Firefox).

  17. FYI, Copernic contains adware. by Shanep · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
    1. Re:FYI, Copernic contains adware. by Scutter · · Score: 3, Informative

      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."

      It also says this:


      # Keywords and result contents processed by Copernic Desktop Search
      Copernic Desktop Search does not allow transmission of keywords or result contents to Copernic Technologies, Inc. or any of its partner for searches conducted by the user on his computer or corporate or home network. If the software ever requires collection and processing of data, such as user's profile, location, search history, fields of interest and tastes, these data should be processed only by the user's computer and not be transmitted deliberately to Copernic Technologies, Inc. or any of its partner.

      I'd like to know how they reconcile the two. CDS does interface to web searches, though, so perhaps that's what they use.

      --

      "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
  18. Re:Why is desktop search so hot? by eric_01 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  19. Take your pick by useosx · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.