Which desktop search?

[silverart]

What desktop search do you use? I am quite happy with copernic but I don't like that it does not index outlook tasks and calendar. What alternative would you recomend?

[Jay Levitt]

I tried a bunch last year, and decided that Google Desktop was the best for me:

- Open format, so there's at least a possibility that I could write, or pay someone to write, indexing plugins for something (though I will, of course, never get around to that)

- Indexes Thunderbird e-mail, which I need
- Indexes both Firefox and IE history
- Performs well
- Integrates nicely with desktop (as a deskbar, not sidebar) and Firefox (especially w/Google Web History)
- Indexes Trillian IM conversations
- Indexes Outlook
- Lets me search by mail folder

My big pet peeve is that it doesn't index MyLifeOrganized. MLO does have a partial XML export, so it'd be theoretically possible to write a script that does an export once in a while, then translates it into a Google-palatable format.. again, round tuit.

My small pet peeve is that the auto-suggest doesn't take phrases into account (although the actual search does), so if I search for jet-pack, the auto-suggest will pop up anything with either "jet" or "pack" in it.

My caveat is that, at least at one point, it wasn't fully indexing the text of long files; I forget what the cutoff was, if you could tweak it, and if that's still an issue.

That said, the state of the art changes rapidly, so it's always good to do a quick evaluation of the latest and greatest of everything. At the time, I tried Copernic, X1, Windows/MSN, and something else I can't remember (I thought it was called Blitz, but apparently not). The Windows Desktop search has also been rewritten for Vista/Office 2007, so see if that works for you.

There's a (probably incomplete) list at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desktop_search as well.

[dschaffner]

Google desktop for me too. It blazingly fast, and always seems to find what I'm looking for.

I also use "Lookout Search" which is an Outlook add-in for searching within my current outlook file.

- Don

[moises]

. . .
My big pet peeve is that it doesn't index MyLifeOrganized. MLO does have a partial XML export, so it'd be theoretically possible to write a script that does an export once in a while, then translates it into a Google-palatable format.. again, round tuit.
. . .

I don't use MLO; I use Achieve Planner (AP), but have a similar problem. This is why I regularly synch AP with Outlook. Now my trusted system is searchable with Google desktop via Outlook. Why don't you synch MLO with Outlook?

[Jay Levitt]

Why don't you synch MLO with Outlook?

Because I'm a stubborn perfectionist who doesn't want to use Outlook as an intermediary "noisy filter" when I know perfectly well that given infinite time, I could easily create an MLO-to-Google-Desktop plugin suite which is the Right Way To Do It?

What's that, you say? Oh, I see.

[Terry B.]

I went through a period of trying every one that I could find and kept coming back to Google Desktop.

[moises]

Because I'm a stubborn perfectionist who doesn't want to use Outlook as an intermediary "noisy filter" when I know perfectly well that given infinite time, I could easily create an MLO-to-Google-Desktop plugin suite which is the Right Way To Do It?

What's that, you say? Oh, I see.

Thanks! My first chuckle all day.