Copernic, the leader in desktop search tool companies, today announced version 1.5 of it's Free Copernic Desktop Search. Much has changed in the desktop search market since Copernic released version 1.1 last year. Microsoft, Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Ask Jeeves, X1, Blinkx - all entered the lucrative market with great products. Mamma, another search engine company, also made an entry by buying Copernic.
Copernic 1.5 now fully supports Mozilla Thunderbird, Eudora emails, indexing of network drives, filmstrip viewing of images, an embedded audio/video player, and the ability to search JPEG picture comments, iTunes songs by artist and album, and metadata indexing of QuickTime movies and OGG audio files. There is support for developers too - third-party developers now have a well-documented COM API that allows them to write CDS plug-ins for indexing additional file types. This reminds me of the iFilter in MSN Desktop Search. They claim to have made number of user interface tweaks as well. For full list of features planned in 1.5, click here.
I continue to miss support for .chm / .hlp files in Copernic but yes, the new improved version is still free and my favorite among all Desktop Search programs.
PCMag rates CDS 4 out of 5. X1 is the only one to provide support for Lotus Notes but $75 for just one additional feature ? Is it enough for someone to buy X1 when so may free desktop search programs are available.