Desktop Search Tools

Pandia takes a look at alternative desktop search tools that lets you search for files and emails on your own computer.

See also part I which presents the most well known free desktop search tools from Google, MSN, Copernic, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves.

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.

Blinkx desktop search for Windows and Mac

(January 7 2005, update January 11) The upcoming versions of the Apple Macintosh operating system. OS X Tiger, will include a new desktop search program called Spotlight.

Apart form this there are not many alternatives for doing a complete search of files on your computer. Neither Copernic, Google Desktop Search or the MSN Toolbar Suite are available for the Mac.

However Blinkx 2.0 is available for Windows as well as for the Macintosh OS X.

One original aspect with Blinkx is that it uses the content of the documents you are currently working on to narrow down search results.

Blinkx also includes so-called smart folders, which are created on the basis of existing normal folders or a search query defined by you. Blinkx will automatically fill and update the smart folder with similar documents from your PC, news articles from the Web, TV, radio or video clips etc.

Blinkx for the Mac will index Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel worksheets, Adobe Acrobat documents, HTML pages, Text documents, Eudora emails, PDFs, zip-files, MP3s, QuickTime files and JPEGs, as well as many Mac only applications, including files from the Safari browser and the Microsoft Entourage e-mail client.

Apple Mac OS Spotlight desktop search tool

With the launch of Mac OS X Tiger Macintosh users have got a really useful desktop search tool as an integrated part of the OS. Welcome Spotlight!

According to Apple, it searches not only files, folders and documents but also messages in Mail, contacts in Address Book, iCal calendars, System Preferences and applications.

The Spotlight search field is located in the top right hand corner of the screen, in Tiger’s menu bar. In this way, it is always available. To start a search, all you have to do is click the icon and start typing. You see results as soon as you type the first letter.

Spotlight maintains a comprehensive, constantly updated index of both files and metadata: the kind of content, the author, edit history, format, size and other details. The content of your files is indexed too, so search results include the contents of a file or document, not just its title.