Desktop Search Recommendations
In recent years, a number of exciting new "desktop search" software products have been released. These products allow you to perform nearly-instantaneous searches of content on your computer -- including documents, emails and more.
What is desktop search? Why should I care?
Ever have trouble finding a document on your computer? Or an old email? Sure, your operating system or your email program might offer a "find files" tool, or a "search email" button, but if you've ever tried them, you've probably noticed that they're incredibly slow. And their results aren't very user-friendly. That's where desktop search tools come in.
Desktop search tools are add-on software packages that let you search content on your computer really fast, and present the results to you in a user-friendly way. Desktop search tools accomplish this trick in much the same way that a web search engine delivers fast results -- they "crawl" your computer for documents, emails, etc., and build an index that you can quickly search.
Desktop search is incredibly useful to an average information-overloaded activist, because it allows you to spend less energy on your filing systems, and less effort trying to remember exactly where you put each important document or email. Want to find something? Just search for it.
The contenders
The leading free products on the market today include:
There are also a variety of commercial tools targeted at large corporations, and Apple's OS X operating system has some desktop search features built right in.
Lots of folks have reviewed the ins and outs of these desktop search products. All of them perform the basic tasks of indexing content and providing reasonably solid search results. Different reviewers have favored different products, for different reasons. We used each for a few days, and here's what we found:
Google Desktop
Search
Very spare and elegant, in typical Google fashion. It's is now our top choice, because it's fast, easy to use and is able to search network drives -- a huge plus in a small office.
Copernic Desktop Search
Our second-place choice. The user interface is not quite as good as others, but it's still very solid. There's no annoying advertising or cross-promotion of products, which we greatly appreciate in a tool we use every day.
Yahoo! Desktop SearchSearches a huge range of file formats, but its user interface just wasn't on a par with the others, nor can it search network drives.
