I'm now using Agent Ransack and it does indeed find text buried deep within documents - and it does it rather fast, too.
-J-Mac
Agent Ransack is another non-indexed search tool.
software that has to create an index, robbing a computer of resources by having a service running in the background that often at inconvenient times start to do its indexing. -Shades
That was much more valid as a criticism in the days of slow PCs with limited memory and small hard drives. But that world is long gone for most of us.
The thought of running individual searches when I want to find something in the 174,071 PDF files on my PC is just too horrible to contemplate. I barely notice any effect of my indexing software (X1) on this 64-bit PC with 8GB of memory and a 256-GB solid state drive. (The data is on a regular HDD.)
Of course, using on-the-fly searching means that when you do want to find something, all that disk thrashing and chasing all over the place will drain the PC's resources, far more so than the limited disk activity that is involved in indexed searches.
With resources no longer a real issue for anyone with a half decent PC, the choice between indexed and non-indexed searching depends on what you want to do. For example, non-indexed searchers can't work with most email software, especially something like Outlook. So you either have to go for indexed or use the software itself. Going for indexed means that the same software can look at email and files at the same time. I can even tell X1 to look for things in in email and files at the same time.
-michaelkenward
Michael,
I agree to your comments about indexing - at least for myself and my computers. I don’t want to make any assumptions with regard to the system capabilities of others however.
My problem is finding an index-based search engine that is worth its salt for a somewhat reasonable price. dtSearch, for example, at $200 for their desktop offering, is well beyond my budget! I don’t use search for any business or formal educational research. My needs are purely to assist me in searching my own saved data. And I do have a fair amount of data! My main desktop box has a 160GB SS system drive, an inernal 3TB SATA drive, and two external drives, one 2TB and one 1TB. I was using X1 - as a matter of fact you were one of my best sources of help on the X1 forum, Michael! - but somewhere around the later V.5xx to V6.0 X1 became very buggy for me. Also the ability to search other drives on my home network became almost impossible. Using the Client Deployment fix stopped working and I became disillusioned. You did help a lot on the forum but the developer was very unhelpful, so I ended up abandoning X1.
I mentioned Agent Ransack above because it did surprise me. I downloaded a very large PDF file last year named "
SZ_Interface Philosophy_0.999...ebook.pdf" as was suggested in an earlier post in this thread - I think by Armando. I selected at random a unique word from near the end of that file and one of my tests for search engines is to search for that word. I do narrow my searches whenever possible, like keeping most of my personal research documents on my 3TB internal SATA drive in one main directory, and I limit the search for that word to that directory. Ransack found that word - along with other rather unique words in that file - in a matter of seconds. It did surprise me!
Michael, I would go back to X1 in a flash if I could be assured that they have their support act together better than it was a few years back. What say you?
Thanks!
Jim
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Seriously though, the Start menu loses focus more often than I'd like. If my cursor strays outside the menu area and a popup occurs from any other software the Start menu - and therefore its search terms and results - are gone. Also if you click on one result and it isn't really what you thought, you have to start again and type in your search term(s), wait for results, etc. Of course I could wait for the first result and then click on the "See more results" link to open the explorer window, but I prefer a window to begin with. A simple search bar similar to the Start menu's search box would be fine if it couldn't lose focus, and if it did not lose all results upon looking at one result. That's a "fail" imo. But if it works for you, hooray! 