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What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

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MrCrispy:
Its a pretty sad state of affairs. Copernic hasn't been updated in ages, v3 was a downgrade. X1 is no longer free, and thus Yahoo is also gone. Google never was a player, they were the first but don't seem to care about desktop search that much, it was just a way to integrate google web search. WDS seems to be adding new features like federation and since its part of Windows, it probably has more users. Then we have Locate, Everything etc which are more suited to file based searches than full text indexing. Archivarius isn't free.

It seems no one is trying anymore, and users have gotten used to existing options. Perhaps there is no demand and no market for better search :(

Crush:
I guess 99% of others is Everything and so it is the hidden winner  ;D

yksyks:
One of the first engines was nowadays forgotten AltaVista Discovery, but it's some eleven years ago... I was even a member of the beta testers group.

I'd also like to point out again that this thread suffers with constant mixing terms of Desktop Search applications and Filename Search applications (like Everything or Locate32). They're mixed even in the poll!

They are hard to compare, because they have different function and different usage. It's like comparing cars to scooters. Both are used to get you from some place to another. The car is definitely more convenient and faster, but if it comes to moving fast somewhere inside building, for example, what would you choose?

While Desktop Search engines usually support searching for filenames, Filename Search engines don't, and if they do, they do it by realtime scanning the files, which might be quite slow, and usually it's limited to text files only.

That's why many people use both. (At the moment I settled on Exalead and Everything). I'd suggest splitting this thread with polls to two separate, but it's too late, I suppose.

Dormouse:
Seems to me that the poll has probably always been out of date.
Each person put in what they used at the moment they were polled - but these polls were at different times, and I'm pretty sure that the majority of us have moved around quite a lot.

I tried WDS for a while, but it was always too intrusive, so off it came.
I liked GDS for quite a long while, but it wasn't just focused on desktop search and gradually felt more intrusive, so off that came too.
I tried Copernic quite often, but its a very long time since I preferred it to anything else.
I mostly use Archivarius now if I want desktop search, but I don't do it that much any more.
I do use Everything, RecentX
I do put stuff I know I will need in Ultra Recall, Evernote
I do use Mailstore (at least when I can't find an email in gmail)
I do use J River & various specialised image databases

One of the first engines was nowadays forgotten AltaVista Discovery, but it's some eleven years ago... I was even a member of the beta testers group.
-yksyks (November 14, 2009, 04:04 AM)
--- End quote ---

I really loved Alta Vista Discovery when it came out (and there's an example of a company that went badly wrong when the whole world was waiting for it), but there was less stuff to search then, even though it felt like a lot. Now I seem to have moved on to more specialised search engines. Of course, this might just be a stage. I might go back to using Archivarius much more in the future.

Darwin:
I've used Copernic, Filehand Search, X1/YDS, GDS, Archivarius, and dtSearch, and WDS. Under Vista (and now W7), I am running WDS. X1, Archivarius, and dtSearch were all brilliant under XP (though my main search engine was X1), but WDS is so tightly integrated in Windows now and it has now been developed to the point where it works really well, that I don't feel the need to install and setup anything else. Of course, this is likely due in large part to the fact that I really don't do much content searching anymore...

For Filename searchers, I've tried a slew of them as well, but found that I really didn't use them much with X1 or WDS installed.

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