Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
qforce:
@ qforce:
Nice piece of software. Looks like it is based on the Eclipse IDE (which is something I appreciate).
-Shades (February 08, 2009, 05:10 PM)
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Yes, you are right. DocFetcher and Eclipse are based on the same GUI toolkit (named SWT), and DocFetcher is being developed in the Eclipse IDE.
When you make such software, how long will it then take for the big software players to gobble up your talent? So let them buy you out after some, enjoy life from the interest those millions generate. By know you are in the ideal position to not care about who prefers whatever.
Your mind is too many steps ahead at this moment ;)
-Shades (February 08, 2009, 05:10 PM)
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I never wanted to work in a big software company. I'm basically a (would-be) scientist who just wrote an utility to better manage his science-related resources and who then decided to share his work with others. And I do care about the needs of my users, because for me, Open Source is basically some sort of "charity".
Lashiec:
So my point is this: I think (and this is really just an opinion), in the case of images and other media a hierarchical management system makes more sense.
-qforce (February 09, 2009, 05:00 AM)
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Considering that you can assign tags (apart from other info) to several media formats and save them within the file, I don't think it does really make more sense. What's more, several apps used to view or manipulate media can parse that data and save it in a local database (only accessible by that app, though). Whether you bother to use those methods is another story.
Both methods are not mutually exclusive, and I use them without problems. Depending of the moment, it makes more sense to use one or another, but I don't think there's an optimal solution.
aenache36:
Hi,
I'm the project admin of DocFetcher, an Open Source desktop search app. I've noticed in several posts in this thread that there seems to be a real need for e-mail indexing and the likes, which puzzles me a bit. More precisely: Why do you guys need an additional program to search your local e-mails when you could use the search feature of your respective e-mail client instead? -qforce (February 08, 2009, 04:41 AM)
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I agree with you when e-mails are involved but their respective attachments are completely different thing, in this case you do need a DtS software.
On a more general note, are there any people out there who definitely need a desktop search app to locate images, music, videos, etc.? If so, then why don't you use your picture managers, media players, etc. to do that? Wouldn't that be a much more efficient and appropriate way to organize images, music, etc.?
I'd be thankful for any enlightenment about this issue.-qforce (February 08, 2009, 04:41 AM)
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Creating and maintaining hierachies takes time, that'a a fact and probably the most important reason for using DtS. Because I don't want to spend time for that the rest my answers follow:
a.Images - can be found in many places therefore I use DtS to find them all and then I view them as thumbnails...and thus the decision is easiest
b. Music - here you can, generally search by filename...or metadata/tags. Or, can be leftovers(.ac3 files) from video conversions(DVD->.avi) that, in time, can stack up heavily...
c. Videos - when you use several sources for getting them on your computer they can also get lost in various places, especially when you have more than 1 HDD. For now I have more than 60 movies on my computer...mpeg/avi/iso/vob, you name it.
I also do not think that the typical savvy DtS user is searching mainly for the above but rather for documents with a certain content, at least this is my case. My search ratio is 95%/5% for content/a,v,p.
Btw, DocFetcher 1.0 is (probably) about to be released this month and adds support for MS Office 2007 and WordPerfect.-qforce (February 08, 2009, 04:41 AM)
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I gave it a try for a folder with less than 500 indexable documents and I got 2 messages:
Needed 19 bytes to create the next chunk header, but only found 4 bytes, ignoring rest of data
### Skipped: Not enough memory left in the Java Virtual Machine.
Also I didn't get what I was expecting from a Boolean search:
search:"word1 word2"
returned a diffent set(number) of documents compared to
search:word1 word2
but in preview in both cases I saw enlightened both search terms(???).
So, for now I wish you all the best but I stick to Autofocus
qforce:
Considering that you can assign tags (apart from other info) to several media formats and save them within the file, I don't think it does really make more sense. What's more, several apps used to view or manipulate media can parse that data and save it in a local database (only accessible by that app, though). Whether you bother to use those methods is another story.
Both methods are not mutually exclusive, and I use them without problems. Depending of the moment, it makes more sense to use one or another, but I don't think there's an optimal solution.
Considering that you can assign tags (apart from other info) to several media formats and save them within the file, I don't think it does really make more sense. What's more, several apps used to view or manipulate media can parse that data and save it in a local database (only accessible by that app, though). Whether you bother to use those methods is another story.
Both methods are not mutually exclusive, and I use them without problems. Depending of the moment, it makes more sense to use one or another, but I don't think there's an optimal solution.
-Lashiec (February 09, 2009, 06:42 AM)
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Okay, good point. Thanks for your answer.
qforce:
I agree with you when e-mails are involved but their respective attachments are completely different thing, in this case you do need a DtS software.
-aenache36 (February 09, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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Now I understand :)
Creating and maintaining hierachies takes time, that'a a fact and probably the most important reason for using DtS. Because I don't want to spend time for that the rest my answers follow:
a.Images - can be found in many places therefore I use DtS to find them all and then I view them as thumbnails...and thus the decision is easiest
b. Music - here you can, generally search by filename...or metadata/tags. Or, can be leftovers(.ac3 files) from video conversions(DVD->.avi) that, in time, can stack up heavily...
c. Videos - when you use several sources for getting them on your computer they can also get lost in various places, especially when you have more than 1 HDD. For now I have more than 60 movies on my computer...mpeg/avi/iso/vob, you name it.
I also do not think that the typical savvy DtS user is searching mainly for the above but rather for documents with a certain content, at least this is my case. My search ratio is 95%/5% for content/a,v,p.
-aenache36 (February 09, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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You seem to be the kind of user who doesn't clean up his folders very often and who then uses full hard drive desktop search to keep that mess under control. Don't get me wrong though, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing it this way. (I'm the kind of user who's folders are highly organized and who only uses desktop search to access stuff where the hierarchical system doesn't help much, i.e. documents.)
I gave it a try for a folder with less than 500 indexable documents and I got 2 messages:
Needed 19 bytes to create the next chunk header, but only found 4 bytes, ignoring rest of data
### Skipped: Not enough memory left in the Java Virtual Machine.
-aenache36 (February 09, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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The Java Virtual Machine in which DocFetcher is running has a memory cap, and your file was too big for that. The manual explains how to raise that cap. However, I admit that this error message should've been more helpful.
Also I didn't get what I was expecting from a Boolean search:
search:"word1 word2"
returned a diffent set(number) of documents compared to
search:word1 word2
but in preview in both cases I saw enlightened both search terms(???).
-aenache36 (February 09, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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The first case is AND, the second one is OR. Well, the preview highlighting wasn't fully implemented... :-[ Thanks for pointing this out.
So, for now I wish you all the best but I stick to Autofocus
-aenache36 (February 09, 2009, 08:33 AM)
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To each his own. :Thmbsup:
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