Desktop Search Engines Information

Updated March 2009

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Search Engines

Desktop Search Engines Links

The preview release of Copernic Mobile (a free download) lets you perform remote searches of your PC from an iPhone or other mobile device.

A July 2008 article by Bill Greenwood at InfoToday.com on the future of desktop search notes that both X1 and Google Desktop Search go beyond the user's desktop to search the web.

A cataloging program is useful if you have a small hard drive and store a lot of your files on CD-ROM or Zip Disks. This software creates an index of these files on your hard drive, so you can easily find out which disk holds the file you want. A good example of this kind of software is Advanced Disk Catalog (*est. $20).

Wikipedia's article on desktop search engines includes a chart of basic information on 21 desktop search engines, including their platform(s), licensing information and a variety of brief notes.

WikiInfo.org provides detailed information on five lesser-known desktop search engines, including Beagle, Tracker, Recoll, Strigi and Jindex. All five applications work on Linux and three on Mac OS X, but only one works on Windows; some of these apps are still works-in-progress.

Since Outlook archives (PST files) often seem to be problematic for desktop search engines, consider the workaround proposed at TechRepublic.com: saving the individual messages into folders.

Quite a few users say they prefer version 2 of Copernic to the latest version 3. A forum thread at Oldversion.com discusses this and includes a link to a download site for version 2.

Google provides a list of search plugins for its Desktop Search. Be sure to read the user-written reviews before installing one.

Wikipedia explains the difference between NTFS and FAT file systems.

Since desktop search engines keep evolving, you should check the latest lists of file types the top programs can index before making a final choice:

Windows Desktop Search 4 file types.

Copernic Desktop Search file types.

Google Desktop Search file types.

X1 Enterprise file types.