The software here may do more, but the reason it’s listed is because it can index your hard drive and let you find stuff really quickly. Oh, and they work on Windows. Here they are in no particular order (some more to come on this: see my earlier posting.)
- diskMETA The blurb: The question Where is that document? does not exist any longer. Ask diskMETA-computer document search this question and you will get an answer in a fraction of a second. The price: free to $100
- Archivarius 3000 The blurb: a full-featured application to search documents and e-mail on computer, local network and removable drives (CD, DVD). Documents can be searched by keyword or using query language, the same as in Internet search engines. The price: $20 and $45
- X1 The blurb: X1 is PC software that uses an advanced indexing process that lets you find any word in any email message or file on your computer with breathtaking speed. Download your free trial version now! The price: $78 (a free version of this is available as Yahoo! Desktop Search beta edition)
- Enfish Find The blurb: The toolbar/taskbar solution for users needing quick access to information. Enfish Find allows users to find any information quickly from the Start Taskbar or Toolbar in Microsoft Outlook applications. Find instantly pops-up a window with a list of items meeting your search criteria. The price: $50
- dtSearch Desktop The blurb: dtSearch Desktop provides instant searching of desktop-accessible files. The price: $200
- Scopeware Vision The blurb: It’s awfully hard to retrace your steps to locate every file and email you’ve ever created, but there’s no need to. Scopeware Vision is the ultimate finder. It searches your PC or network and shows you the results as a stream of docs, emails, PDFs, web pages, photos, songs, or whatever you seek. The price: $30 up
- SearchWithin (thanks Blog.org) The blurb: SearchWithin is a free full text index search engine that allows you to quickly search inside the files on your drive or network. It looks beyond the titles and inside PDF, HTML, Text, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Word Perfect and Microsoft PowerPoint documents. SearchWithin works just like major search engines, using advanced querying and full-text search technologies to help you find the information you need fast. Results are automatically displayed in your browser. The price: free
- 80-20 Retriever The blurb: Retriever Enterprise is a robust search tool that executes fast, accurate searching of all email folders and local/network file systems, to give users one access point to information stored on their personal systems. The award winning software acts as an all-encompassing “retriever” of information on individual workstations, providing users with a quick, comprehensive view of buried material. The price: $300 (thanks to David Brake of Blog.org)
- Tukaroo The blurb: Tukaroo desktop software provides the fastest search of desktop and LAN, categorizes and displays search results [and] correlates desktop searches with Internet content. The price: free (not yet past beta; recently bought out by Ask Jeeves. I noticed that by early January the Tukaroo website is down.)
- HotBot Desktop The blurb: The HotBot Desktop allows you to easily search the web while not losing the context of where you are in the results. Quickly visit all 10 results with half the clicks! Easily adjust the language, number of results as well as other preferences through web settings. The price: free
- Grokker (thanks to David Brake of Blog.org who points out that Grokker includes a plug-in that uses Microsoft’s built in indexer) The blurb: The “My Files” plug-in lets you access the contents of your hard drive in two different ways. Using the keyword search, you can locate any file that contains a specific word in its name or content. Also, Grokker lets you graphically map and explore your hard drive, or any shared drive, over a local network. The price: $50
- Wilbur The blurb: Once Wilbur has indexed your files, he can display all of the files containing a specific word or set of words almost instantly. It is able to do this while keeping its index file much smaller than that the alternatives we have looked at. Wilbur can optionally track information on all files on your disk, not just the ones whose content is indexed. The price: free (thanks, Henry Finn)
- blinkx The blurb: blinkx changes the way you find and access all kinds of information, from anywhere in the world, without having to search endlessly. blinkx rapidly links you with the information you need from the web, from online news sources and files on your own PC. The price: free
- Copernic Desktop Search The blurb: CDS brings the power of a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use search engine right to your PC and allows you instantly to search files, e-mails, and email attachments stored anywhere on your PC hard drive. It executes sub-second searching of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDFs, and all popular music, picture and video formats. CDS also searches your browser history, favorites, and contacts. Price: free
- Google Desktop Search The blurb: Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if we had photographic memories. It’s a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you’ve viewed. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop Search puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails, and bookmarks. Price: free
- MSN Toolbar Suite The blurb: Warning! Your browser does not meet the minimum system requirements. You are recommended to use the MSN Toolbar Suite with Internet Explorer 5.01 or later. (no really) Price: free
Don’t forget http://www.blinkx.com/ (free) which you mentioned a few days ago.
You can also now download “Lookout for Outlook” for free from http://www.lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/download.html now that Microsoft has bought it. Make sure you have:
* Microsoft Outlook™ 2000 or later (not Outlook Express, please)
* Microsoft Windows 2000 or later
Lookout also uses Microsoft .NET Framework version 1.1.
As the MSN Sandbox pages say,
You can use Lookout to search your:
* Email messages
* Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
* Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
* Files on your computer or other computers
* … Very soul (okay, not true)
Copernic Desktop Search is another free option.
I loved the Copernic Desktop search – unfortunately my Pentium 4 with 3 mhz speed was too slow!!! With a large number of document files – 14,000 it slowed my computer to a halt, so I had to uninstall – When they get it right – I’d be happy to pay for it. Any suggestions?
CDS does not keep indexes of removable medias
Well, I think you should always have up to date email backups. I used to do it manually by saving the .dbx files, until I found http://www.amicutilities.com/outlook-express-backup/ – Outlook Express Backup Genie that does it automatically at regular times.
I choused it over other because it can work with both MS Outlook and Outlook Express
Alicia
I used both and had our company adopt Archivarius over Copernic. In plain sense, Copernic is useless for information research. Why? Because it lacks ability to sort data by relevance.
Eg: We have over 500GB of text docs and searching for “best time to sleep” in Copernic yields thousands of files. And who is gonna spend almost 10 hours looking through thousands of files to find a relevant documents.
Archivarius returns the most relevant document on top. Like Google. Hence you instantly find the exact relevant document you’re looking for.
So Copernic Desktop Search is probably the most useless software of 2005-2007 for information research. And will continue to be unless they include the relevancy feature.
-Andre