The Desktop search category is getting lot of attention these especially after Copenic and others released there tools free. I will try to compare the three most popular tools in this category.
The comparison is grouped by most common tasks.
Filetypes: All these tools can index most common type of Microsoft Office documents, Email and attachments, PDF files, Common Graphic formats and music files. I would give more points to X1 as it can index certain types of Adobe specific documents like .ai and also index Eudora and Netscape emails.
Indexing Options: It is quite similar in all the three tools. You have the option to decide which folders are to be indexed, the folder where index would be stored and also free to choose the frequency when the index would be updated. You can even add new file types but it is limited only text format files. Wish I could index my collection of .chm files !! While indexing, X1 gives you the percentage of information that is index but Copernic gives a very detailed description of what file / folder it is indexing. Filehand disappoints as you have to refresh the view to see what has been indexed so far.
Searching Capabilities: Again, all of them perform equally well in this category, all support boolean expressions. X1 website has a detailed set of syntax rules for search. In Filehand, you have to press Return to begin search while in X1 and Copernic, the search happens as soon as you type something in the search box. The Filehand style may be good for old computers which have less processing power.
Result Preview: Though Filehand tries to give you the result in a Google like format, I somehow didn't like it. Also, all my macros and formulae in the Excel sheets were displayed as text in the results which was very disappointing. X1 has a very nice preview pane and the rendering of documents is close to perfect. It color codes the search keywords much like Google does. Even Copernic does a great job of rendering. However, Filehand gives you and addition capability to see more / less excerpts of the results at the search result pane.
Final Verdict: X1 is a clear winner. They also have an active support forum which comes with an RSS feed. If you are tight on budget, go for Copernic. It is free and does the job beautifully.
P.S. I didn't have a chance to review other popular tools like blinkx and hotbot. But they look promising. I think we will have a plethora of search of options before the much publicized Longhorn is released in the market.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2004/10/detailed-comparison-of-desktop-search.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Jacques Surveyer has an excellent summary of alternatives (including several free ones) to Google's desktop search.
http://www.theopensourcery.com/wordp1/index.php?p=116
Written on 17/10/04 3:00 PM
There is lot of talk that X1 phones home. According to Noel Ferreria, a Customer Service Rep. at X1:
X1 does not log information about the contents of files on your comptuer. X1 does not send back information about the contents of your files.
What X1 does send back is:
1 - Information about how certain features are used, information about how tabs were used, information about how many file types were used in X1, etc.
2 - Crash information
3 - Registration key check (if you are registered user)
You can check the usage.log file in the X1 index directory to see what is being sent.
X1 has no way of knowing if you have the Incredible Hulk on DVD or if you have the latest Offspring album in MP3 format. We simply do not log this information. As a result, there is no need to worry about RIAA subpoenas or DMCA issues.
What X1 is lacking is clarity on this subject. Changes are coming down the pipe so that this type of confusion can be prevented in the future. Look for these changes in a future release. Some of the changes include the ability for users to review what is being sent before it is actually sent.
Written on 18/10/04 11:13 AM
PCWorld has a comparison matrix.
It has never been easier to search for misplaced files and e-mail messages, thanks to tools such as these finders. Our choice of the three e-mail-based search utilities is the free Lookout, while DtSearch tops the seven file finders that work outside your e-mail.
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,117809,pg,4,00.asp
Written on 18/10/04 11:26 AM
CNet has a very detailed matrix that compares the six most popular products namely Blinkx, Copernic, Google Desktop (Beta), HotBot, Lookout, X1 but misses out important players like x-friend and Filehand.
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2004/10/comparison-of-programs-that-search.html
Written on 20/10/04 2:08 PM
Blinkx
Blinkx first made its name on the blog circuit -- maybe because the program lets you search through blogs to find the latest opinions on anything from elections to rejections.
The product offers an uncluttered interface, with buttons at the top of the screen for searching a variety of different file types, including Adobe PDF, PowerPoint PPT, Excel XLS, Word DOC, JPEG, and MP3. Below that is a line of icons for searching the Web, with news, video, shopping, and blog options for more specialized searches.
The video search function, which is one of the features that differentiates Blinkx from its rivals, locates videos from the BBC, Fox, ITN, and Bloomberg news. Those may not be your favorite viewing choices if you're a CNN or MSNBC fan, but at least you have more news channels to pick from than a '70's-era TV set.
The program also installs a handy toolbar that shows up at the upper right-hand corner of the screen while you work with some programs, like Microsoft Word, although it doesn't show up with Eudora. The Blinkx toolbar includes icons for finding results from local documents, news, the Web, products, video clips, blogs, and BusinessWeek. Some of the toolbar options did not always seem to work, however. While the Shopping icon showed a few results (perhaps hinting at a possible source of revenue in the future for the makers of this freebie program), clicking on the BusinessWeek icon indicated that part of the program was out of business.
Another unusual feature, the Blinkx Visualizer tool, presents Web search results in an unusual, graphical, color-coded chart that shows the connections between the Web pages found by the application.
Easy to use, Blinkx does an effective job of hunting through a hard drive for the information you know you have somewhere, but you're just not sure exactly where. If you want to search outside the My Documents folder, be aware that you do have to specify any other folders in the Settings dialog box.
Blinkx works quickly, beginning to display search results even as you type in the terms. The app uncovered a whole host of documents, many of them practically unrelated to the term I searched for. For example, when I typed in the word "trial," the first draft of this article was listed near the top, even though it only had one mention of a "trial version" in it.
One caveat: Security-conscious users should note that, because Blinkx joins the Web search to the hard drive search, some concerns have been voiced for both this and the Google search engine. However, no real instances of privacy problems have emerged so far.
On the whole, Blinkx helps you find the piece of information you're seeking very quickly.
Copernic Desktop Search
Copernic sounds like a nickname for a famous astronomer, but it's actually a company that has its roots as a Web search engine aggregator, going back to the dot-com heyday of 1997, when it was known as Agents Technologies. Its new desktop search program, Copernic Desktop Search, has probably the best thought-out interface of the applications reviewed here.
The software features a clever split-screen interface that initially shows files grouped according to the most recent date in the top pane, with a preview of any highlighted files in the pane below. Up top are icons for Web search, e-mails, files, music, pictures, videos, contacts, favorites, and history, so you can perform customized searches for exactly the kind of file you are seeking.
Can't remember the exact name you gave to a song or picture you have somewhere on your hard drive? The program supports Boolean operators, quotation marks to indicate whole words and exact phrases, and parentheses to nest queries. You can further refine searches by choosing a particular file size, date, type, or folder from pick lists grouped along the left side of the screen.
While it doesn't have the neat button-bar that Blinkx has, Copernic adds a "deskbar" to the bottom of the screen in the taskbar where you can just type your search term.
Copernic does searches quickly and it features an "instant indexing" technology that automatically indexes files as they arrive or are created on a PC. Unlike Blinkx, when Copernic is first installed, it swiftly creates an index of all the relevant files on the PC rather than just the files in certain folders. It indexes e-mail messages and the attachments, and handles both Outlook and Eudora e-mail programs, which is good news for Eudora fans like myself. The program also searches Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Adobe PDF, HTML, as well as various image, music, and video formats.
The search uncovered plenty of files when I used terms like "trial" and "work." For some reason, it had trouble initially finding the few PowerPoint files I had on my machine (I'm not very big on presentations). But when I opened one of them manually later, it listed the file in its index.
Copernic doesn't include a Web search, which could be good or bad, depending on your point of view. If you're just looking for a desktop search engine, this is an excellent choice.
Google Desktop Search
Google drew wide attention when it introduced a beta version of its desktop search program earlier in October (although it didn't generate quite as much buzz as its Gmail e-mail service).
Once the software is downloaded and installed, Google takes several hours to index a hard drive in the background. Once it's installed, Google Desktop Search is integrated seamlessly into the familiar Google Web search interface and simply shows up as an option called Desktop when you visit the usual Google Web site.
The search results even look similar to those you would see when doing a Google Web search. It found lots of results when I searched for terms like "work" and "trial," even discovering them in my own Web-based Yahoo Mail messages.
The program is able to access Outlook and Outlook Express e-mails, Microsoft Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, Web pages viewed with Internet Explorer, AOL Instant Messenger chat logs, and text files. However, it doesn't access Eudora e-mail, as Blinkx and Copernic do, nor does it display pages that you have previously viewed with browsers like Opera or Mozilla Firefox.
On the other hand, the program is still in beta. Google is sure to improve it and incorporate user suggestions before the release of version 1.0 (or the next IPO).
X1 Desktop Search
X1 Desktop Search comes from X1 Technologies, a company funded by Idealab, whose founder Bill Gross was largely responsible for developing the DOS-based desktop search program Lotus Magellan back in 1989. Traces of Magellan show up in X1, which features a surprisingly large array of file viewers for nearly extinct DOS applications.
While, like Blinkx and Copernic, X1 boots up with your machine, it starts as a separate application (rather than as a taskbar), and you need to close down the session manually. That can get annoying, but there is an option available to keep it from loading at start-up. You can also configure the frequency of when you want X1 to index your files.
X1 locates files, e-mail messages, and contacts. The program supports Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora Mail, and Netscape Mail, making it particularly flexible with e-mail. The program also supports Microsoft Office and Adobe PDF files, as well as HTML files. Plus, it includes viewers for files produced by an unusually wide variety of DOS, Windows, and Macintosh applications, including old chestnuts such as DisplayWrite, MultiMate, Samna Word, FoxBase, Framework, First Choice, and Volkswriter, bringing back waves of nostalgia to longtime PC users (and enabling them to clean up some of that backlog of long-forgotten files).
The program's viewer offers a split-screen interface. Up top, X1 displays a list of file names, e-mails, and e-mail attachments matching your search term, categorized by date, time, from/to information, subject, size, and other criteria. Below, the viewer pane displays a preview of the highlighted file, message, or attachment, although in some cases you have to click on the file in order to display it. The program founds scads of matching e-mails when I typed in search terms like "work" and "trial," though it only identified files whose names contained the word "trial" rather than any documents that had the word somewhere within their contents.
You have the option of replying to an e-mail, forwarding it, or creating a new e-mail message from within X1, which then takes you back to your original e-mail program. X1 works very quickly, displaying a list of appropriate files or e-mail messages while you're in the midst of typing in your selection.
X1 could be handyBut unlike the free Blinkx, Copernic, and Google desktop search programs, X1 sells for $74.95. A free 15-day trial version is available for download from the X1 Web site. If you often do intensive searches, or need to search through more obscure file formats, it could be worth it. However, if you're like me and just want to find an occasional file, you'll probably opt for one of the freebies instead.
Blinkx v. 0.4.34
Blinkx
http://www.blinkx.com
Price: Free
Copernic Desktop Search v. 1.1
Copernic Technologies, Inc.
http://www/copernic.com
Price: Free
Google Desktop Search (beta)
Google, Inc.
http://desktop.google.com
Price: Free
X1 Desktop Search v. 04.09
X1 Technologies, Inc.
http://www.x1.com
Price: $74.95, free 15-day trial
Written on 9/11/04 10:52 AM
PCWorld prefers CDS over GDS.
Google wants to help you effectively access the information you store in e-mails, documents, Web pages, contact lists, and entertainment and all the other files stored on your PC, with its new, free Google Desktop Search (GDS) tool. And who better to help you with this task than the most popular search engine on the Internet?
Although Google's GDS tool has useful features, in my test of the beta software, it also appears to be a potential security nightmare. Unfortunately, Google did not respond to my request for comment on these issues.
Desktop search is one of the hottest areas in the search market, as users look for ways to find information on their PCs with the same ease and speed as with Internet search engines like, well, Google. And Google is not the only major name on the Web taking action in this area.
Major Players
Microsoft, which also declined to be interviewed for this story, recently announced plans to release new desktop search technology by the end of the year. AOL, which already offers local search, multimedia search, image search, news search, and product search, has acknowledged that it, too, has developed a beta desktop search product. And Yahoo also has a desktop search tool in beta, but it wasn't willing to let us look at it just yet.
Software makers Blinkx , Copernic Technologies , and X1 Technologies already offer desktop search tools as well. The Blinkx and Copernic tools are free; X1's tool is $74.95 (free trial version).
A Head-to-Head Comparison
So how good is Google on the desktop? To find out, I took both GDS and Copernic's well-regarded Desktop Search (CDS) tools out for a spin.
GDS downloads and installs in no time. Although I had to free up some space to finish the install (GDS forces you to have 1GB of free space on your C: drive, even if you have another drive installed with ample room, as I did), the application immediately sets out building a central index of your entire electronic existence--but only on the C: drive.
It took a little more than an hour to index about 20G of data--not including Adobe PDF files, which the beta version does not index. The indexing takes place in the background, however, so you can continue to work while it does.
When finished, GDS adds a small, colorful icon to your computer's start menu, which launches the software with a double-click. GDS has the look and feel of Google's familiar Internet search engine.
Users will discover that they can go to Google.com on the Internet and find a "desktop" tab waiting for them there as well. This allows users to easily switch between searching the Internet and searching their desktop, or even to integrate the two into a single search of both their PC and the Web.
However, a search produces an uncategorized list of hits ranked by either relevance or date, just as a Google-only search does. As with search engines in general, a highly specific search with GDS will yield on-target results. But if your request is more general, you might have to wade through long lists of Web pages, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and instant messaging texts when all you're searching for is an e-mail message.
Copernic Gets It Right
In contrast, CDS offers a user interface that assists you in sorting and finding data. CDS works as fast as you can type, and your results are sorted according to file type and date. Unlike GDS, Copernic's tool can find PDF files, and will automatically detect external hard drives connected to your PC and index them as well.
But one thing that Copernic's free desktop search engine doesn't do is include secure Web pages in its index. And that's a good thing, since secure Web pages (those whose URL starts with "https") include things like online banking statements and e-commerce sites where your credit card information resides.
With Google's tool, unless you indicate otherwise either at installation or later, all such information is included, even though such pages are supposed to be secure and accessible only if you have entered the correct user names and passwords for your protection. GDS does, however, let you easily select the types of files you want indexed via its Preferences page.
Other Features
GDS doesn't offer much else in the way of features or customization. Users can restrict the program from indexing portions of their hard drive or other sensitive information. For example, the GDS Preferences page allows the user to enter files into a "Don't Search These Items" box. However, the user must understand exactly where that data is stored and how the Windows file structure works.
GDS even indexes and caches hard drive data protected with an encryption program like Pretty Good Privacy. How? It's simple: GDS adds all viewed documents and pages to its cache--after you've gone through the security handshakes. (Go to Preference to turn off this capability if you miss it during installation. Note that any secure pages GDS already has in its index remain there, but they are hidden from search results unless you choose to include them once again.) I couldn't find any way to stop GDS from caching PGP files or drives--it's similar to the problem this tool poses with the secure Web pages.
And GDS stores its painfully complete index in one "convenient" location on your hard drive, with no encryption or password protection--a hacker's and worm writer's dream come true.
Copernic, in contrast, enables users to select exactly what they want to index using a simple and familiar graphical dialog box that shows the file-tree structure. And they can restrict indexing to a particular hard drive partition or to specific mail folders within Outlook. Users can also decide to index all contacts in their global Exchange address book, or only personal contacts in Outlook.
Copernic users also enjoy greater control over their searches. For example, they can set the application's advanced Preferences so that it skips photo files that are smaller than 16 by 16 pixels, or music files that are less than 10 seconds long. And if extremely large files are a concern, users can manually set (in General Preferences) a size limit for files to be indexed. Those files will always be excluded from searches.
Desktop search is a wonderful concept. Using either of these products can save you time. However, Copernic's tool offers certain protections, thanks to the way its software is structured. With Google's tool, you might do better to wait until its security flaws are addressed.
Full story here.
Written on 24/11/04 4:52 PM
Recently, I felt the need to a desktop search tool and since last week (May 14, 2007), I started trying. I'd like to share my personal experience with 3 popular free desktop search tools: X1, google desktop search (GDS), and windows desktop search (WDS).
WDS was really slow and like GDS didn't find any PDF, despite installing Acrobat Ifilter.
X1 pros:
1. You can index whenever you want. GDS real-time indexing slowed down my machine.
2. You can index where you want. GDS also provides exclusion of some folders, but X1's folder selection is much easier to use.
3. X1 indexes/finds (almost) everything I needed. GDS failed to index my PDF files and the suggestions on its help page on why that can happen was not helpful at all.
GDS pros:
1. Unlike X1, it finds Unicode keywords.
2. I like GDS's user interface better (simpler) and faster.
The bottom line is that, only if GDS could index my PDFs files, i might have put up with its uncntrollable, non-transparent indexing.
Written on 21/5/07 10:05 AM