Pandia Post No. 24 Part 2

Alternative desktop search tools

(December 2004) 2004 has been the year of the desktop search tools, software that lets you find files and emails on your own computer.

Google, MSN, Copernic and Ask Jeeves have been dominating the press coverage, and you may read about their desktop search products in our resource section.

However, there are other players out there, and we will look at some of them here.

x-friend desktop search

The German company x-dot GmbH has developed a desktop search tool based on Java, which runs within the Web browser on Windows, Linux, OS2 Warp, Sun and Mac machines.

x-friend, as it is called, will search files on your own computer, including jpeg, mp3, doc, xls, pdf, txt, and will let you sort results by file type, date, size etc.

x-friend also searches the internet, product catalogues, internet news (RSS-feeds), emails and other search services.

x-dot adds that x-friend offers "a P2P-like search in external shared folders of other x-friend users. Therefore, x-friend enables you to set up a client-server environment easily."

Pandia is currently testing x-friend on a Mac. The fact that the program supports advanced Boolean searching is -- for instance -- a good sign.

ISYS desktop search

Another desktop search tool that deserves more attention is the ISYS:desktop product .

ISYS desktop search has a long history, as it was originally developed for MS DOS in 1988 (sic!). To date, ISYS:desktop has been adopted by nearly 10,000 organizations, ranging from law firms and government agencies to criminal intelligence units and large corporate departments.

ISYS in not free, the main reason being that it is developed for corporate power users. Unlike most desktop search programs you may, for instance, use it to index not only your computer, but your whole corporate network. It supports as many as 125 file formats.

There is full support for advanced search queries and stemming, as well as multi-lingual capabilities,. Fuzzy Logic is used to automatically adjust for many OCR scanning or typographical errors that occur when you scan in documents for searching.

ISYS will run under Windows 95/98/ME and Windows NT/2000/XP.

dtSearch

Like ISYS, dtSearch has a large range of products that can be used to search text on your own computer, your network, and your Internet or Intranet site.

DtSearch is programmed for Windows and .NET. a LINUX version for programmers is available.

The dtSearch Desktop product supports fuzzy, phonic, wildcard, stemming and thesaurus search options and will display your search history.

Microsoft Outlook and Office files are covered, as are HTML, PDF, XML, ZIP and other file types. You may export search results in various data formats.

A single user version for one computer costs USD 199. Given that many of the competitors give away their desktop search tools for free, this means that this product is more relevant for big corporate users. A five user version for searching a corporate network costs USD 800.

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