Desktop Search

Do you hate the lousy search capability in Outlook as much as I do? Do you feel it’s a waste of time to wait while Windows scans your entire 40Mb hard disk looking for a file you used 2 days ago but cannot now find?

I sure do.

Enter… Copernic Desktop Search

A few weeks ago, I installed Copernic Desktop Search, a free search utility. It searches my Outlook emails including attachments, files like Word or Excel or Adobe PDF, and more. I’ve only used it for email and file searches. It indexes whenever there is 30 seconds of inactivity to keep my indexes updated.

And now… Google Desktop Search

Today, I installed Google Desktop Search, another free search utility. I’m indexing my files now, so don’t have much usability experience. If it works as well as Google’s web search, I may switch. Google Desktop Search does not index PDF files (bummer!), but it does thread email messages like gmail. It is also supposed to remember webpages you’ve read recently and include them in the search. That will be great!

There are a few obvious differences in the two solutions. Copernic is a stand-alone program in the traditional Windows style. Google runs in a web browser with the url http://127.0.0.1:4664/ (running on the localhost with port number 4664).

Sometimes I run a local webserver (Apache) on port 80, so I don’t know if this will interfere. More on that after I use it.

I have had some additional crashes in my Windows XP system since installing Copernic. It seems that sometimes Outlook and Copernic are fighting over my mail files. The system locks up and killing the processes is the only way out.

My friend Rob has blogged about Google’s desktop search on his blog.

We’ll see how Google works.

Well, I need to quite typing so Google can resume indexing my email and desktop files.