What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

[Darwin]

I decided to update the all-in-one index in PaperPort... The reason it takes so long is that it uses OCR technology to convert the pdfs to text. I have 10's of thousands of pdfs, some up to 1000 pages long, hence the HUGE amount of time it takes to index. Why it is done this way is beyond me - the three dedicated indexers that I mentioned index my pdfs in minutes. THe main advantage to the Nuance approach is that it will index pdfs that have been created by combining images (and not selecitng "save as searchable pdf" or some similar option). These are not indexed by X1, dtSearch or Archivarius and I assume are no indexed by WDS 4, either.

[Carol Haynes]

The trouble with OCR in Paperport/OmniPage/TextBridge (they are all the same as far as i know) is that it is so inaccurate. Unless you are prepared to spend a sizeable chunk of your life manually OCRing PDF files and going through all the errors it generates the indexed versions will be less than useful.

The last version of OmniPage I bought was 'much improved' according to Nuance. Having skipped umpteen versions I figured it was worth another go but it was just as crap as ever. As far as I can tell the only things Nuance add to new versions are ever more annoying activation systems.

Feel better having got that off my chest.

PS: I sent that version of OmniPage back for a refund and vowed never to bother with OCR again.

[Darwin]

Three hours later and PaperPort is on folder 54 of 6027  I'm debating whether this experiment is worth it or not... I certainly don't need to have my pdfs indexed by PaperPort and it's using a lot of CPU... Right, that's that, then. I've just decided that I can't be bothered.

I agree with you about OCR, Carol. However, while using OmniPage to convert a scanned image into a text document can be an exercise in frustration, I've had really good experiences using PDF Converter 4 and now 5 Professional to convert pdfs into searchable documents.

[Curt]

I am not going to test DocFetcher any further - unless someone tells me how to make it start minimized - it is too annoying to see it fill up the screen at each startup! The shortcut is of course marked Start Minimized - I also tried if it would accept -tray for an argument - but to no avail.

[J-Mac]

I am not going to test DocFetcher any further - unless someone tells me how to make it start minimized - it is too annoying to see it fill up the screen at each startup! The shortcut is of course marked Start Minimized - I also tried if it would accept -tray for an argument - but to no avail.

-Curt (October 29, 2008, 06:18 PM)

Heh heh!    Don’t you just hate that !? Try using Chameleon Startup Manager - it does that with ANY program for which I set up a startup delay. Annoying is much too mild a word for this.

If I could find another startup manager that handled start delays I drop this dog in a minute.

Jim

[Darwin]

Both WinPatrol and AnVir Task Manager Pro handle delayed startups. WinPatrol provides you with more options and control and comes in a free version, mind you...

[Darwin]

Oh! And of course. Startup Delayer does this very well as well...

[J-Mac]

Hmm..  I already have Anvir Task Manager but disabled all features which are already covered by other utilities I'm running; of course once I disabled the startup features - because I have Chameleon running - I never considered them again, and I had not even checked them out deep enough to see if it had a delay feature. Likewise I disabled the features that duplicated Process Tamer's tasks. I'll have to look at Anvir's startup capabilities again. Which are you using?

The last time you mentioned WinPatrol I took a look at it but didn't see where it provided for startup delays. Two I looked at allowed delays of up to one minute - that's no help at all. Might as well have them all start together as they are going to bang heads that way too.

Thanks!

Jim

[Dormouse]

WinPatrol allows pretty much total control over startup delays. Right click on the startup prog and you have the option to delay it; move to the delayed startup tab and you can set the time of the delay in 10 second chunks up to 1hr+.

[Darwin]

Jim - I use WinPatrol to delay various programs at startup. As Dormouse notes, it allows you a high degree of control over startup.

I have the latest version of Task Manager Pro installed as well. It's more simplistic in that it allows you to list a bunch of applications to start after windows is loaded (you can specify how long TM Pro waits before starting to load them - default is 60 seconds) and then loads them at a set number of seconds apart (default is 30). This is in contrast to WP, which allows you to set the delay on a per application basis. This is nice if you know that a particular app needs more time than others to load.

As you note, it also duplicates mousers ProcessTamer to a small degree. However, like the startup delay there is not as much end-user configuration possible  - it's a system wide blanket setting, not a per application setting.

[Curt]

I am not going to test DocFetcher any further - unless someone tells me how to make it start minimized - it is too annoying to see it fill up the screen at each startup! The shortcut is of course marked Start Minimized - I also tried if it would accept -tray for an argument - but to no avail.

-Curt (October 29, 2008, 06:18 PM)

Heh heh!    Don’t you just hate that !? Try using Chameleon Startup Manager - it does that with ANY program for which I set up a startup delay. Annoying is much too mild a word for this. If I could find another startup manager that handled start delays I drop this dog in a minute.

Oh! And of course. Startup Delayer does this very well as well...

-Darwin (October 29, 2008, 10:58 PM)

-J-Mac (October 29, 2008, 10:37 PM)

- I was using Startup Delayer! 

Both WinPatrol and AnVir Task Manager Pro handle delayed startups. WinPatrol provides you with more options and control and comes in a free version, mind you...

-Darwin (October 29, 2008, 10:54 PM)

Yesterday I purchased AnVir Pro, so I tried if I could make the dog fetch, ehh... too cheap!.. docfetcher behave more to my liking, but only to realize that when I click docfetcher.exe there will be no docfetcher.exe starting or running; only javaw.exe. DocFetcher works entirely in Java! But I cannot put javaw.exe in Start and expect it then to appear as DocFetcher, can I.

I don't think I will make friends with this dog.

I drop this dog in a minute.

-J-Mac (October 29, 2008, 10:37 PM)

[qforce]

I am not going to test DocFetcher any further - unless someone tells me how to make it start minimized - it is too annoying to see it fill up the screen at each startup! The shortcut is of course marked Start Minimized - I also tried if it would accept -tray for an argument - but to no avail.

-Curt (October 29, 2008, 06:18 PM)

Haha, this one gave me a good laugh. Because, you know, I'm the guy who wrote dog... errh, DocFetcher  , and the reason why I'm laughing is that it feels so unreal to see people making such complaints instead of submitting a feature request.
This is what I like so much about Open Source: Instead of wasting your time being angry, you can either ask the developers to fix it, or fix it yourself.

[Darwin]

Hi qforce - welcome to DC, it's always nice to have developers drop in here, and thanks for pointing us to your feature request forum. I haven't tried DocFetcher, but it looks nice  FYI, Curt's mention of a dog was only peripherally linked to DocFetcher; Jim was actually referring to Chameleon Startup Manager:

Try using Chameleon Startup Manager - it does that with ANY program for which I set up a startup delay. Annoying is much too mild a word for this.

If I could find another startup manager that handled start delays I drop this dog in a minute.

Jim

-J-Mac (October 29, 2008, 10:37 PM)

Hope to see more of you in this thread and around the forum.

[qforce]

Thanks for the friendly welcome
I hope Curd won't take my comment as a personal offence or something; I just couldn't help but laugh

[Curt]

Welcome at DC, qforce, I am glad that you obviously has a sense of humour  :-)


As for the "fix it yourself" possibility, well, I did, didn't I   ;-)   But you are of course right: I should take up coding, so I can show  how to write a program...

Thanks for the link!

[kartal]

Hey that is great. I have not tested your application, but I really really welcome open source desktop search. I just do not like desktop search stuff from Ms, Google and bunch of others. But I hope yours will be successfull.

I will try tonight hopefully.

Btw are you planning any thunderbird and contacts support at all?

Thanks for the friendly welcome
I hope Curd won't take my comment as a personal offence or something; I just couldn't help but laugh

-qforce (November 09, 2008, 04:49 PM)

[qforce]

Btw are you planning any thunderbird and contacts support at all?

-kartal (November 09, 2008, 05:56 PM)

Actually no. With Gmail and all that web stuff I can easily search in my e-mails and contacts from any computer with internet connection, not just from the computer where my e-mail client is installed. That's why I abandoned thunderbird a long time ago, and why I never really felt the need to go beyond document indexing.
Furthermore, I think it would somewhat bloat up the user interface and the search results, making the program less usable for what it was originally written, that is, document retrieval. For a more detailed explanation, you can read the "Comparison To Other Desktop Search Applications" section on the DocFetcher website.

You can, of course, try to convince me otherwise

Btw, the other reason why I left thunderbird behind is that I've lost hundreds of e-mails because I forgot to include them in the backup before formatting the disk. FUCK... Lesson learned: Don't use programs that store important data in obscure "profile" folders.

[4wd]

Btw, the other reason why I left thunderbird behind is that I've lost hundreds of e-mails because I forgot to include them in the backup before formatting the disk. F*CK... Lesson learned: Never use your hard drive as your main e-mail repository.

-qforce (November 09, 2008, 06:40 PM)

And the reason why I only use the portable versions of Firefox and Thunderbird - let's me format/install the system as many times as I like without losing my settings/emails because I forgot to back them up. 

[Grorgy]

looks interesting qforce, do you, or do you intend to support the docx and other formats from MS Office 2007?

[qforce]

looks interesting qforce, do you, or do you intend to support the docx and other formats from MS Office 2007?

-Grorgy (November 09, 2008, 07:06 PM)

DocFetcher will support MS Office 2007 as soon as the guys from Apache POI are done with implementing support for these formats, which I expect to happen soon. (Apache POI is the library DocFetcher uses to extract text from MS Office files.)

[qforce]

I am not going to test DocFetcher any further - unless someone tells me how to make it start minimized - it is too annoying to see it fill up the screen at each startup! The shortcut is of course marked Start Minimized - I also tried if it would accept -tray for an argument - but to no avail.

-Curt (October 29, 2008, 06:18 PM)

@Curt: Some questions I'd like to ask you:
1) Why do you want to start DocFetcher in mimized mode?
2) Would it be enough to have a checkbox "start minimized" on the preferences panel?
Thanks in advance!

[Curt]

I assumed that DocFetcher would need to be placed in Start in order to keep the index updated.
Was I assuming wrongly? If I was, there is of course no need for it to start minimized. But if I was right, and it needs to start with Windows, then it really should start minimized, because I would never use it until later  when I have finished reading my mail, etcetera.
Sure, a checkbox will be all it would take.
Thanks for asking! :-)

[J-Mac]

Hi qforce - welcome to DC, it's always nice to have developers drop in here, and thanks for pointing us to your feature request forum. I haven't tried DocFetcher, but it looks nice  FYI, Curt's mention of a dog was only peripherally linked to DocFetcher; Jim was actually referring to Chameleon Startup Manager:

Try using Chameleon Startup Manager - it does that with ANY program for which I set up a startup delay. Annoying is much too mild a word for this.

If I could find another startup manager that handled start delays I drop this dog in a minute.

Jim

-J-Mac (October 29, 2008, 10:37 PM)

Hope to see more of you in this thread and around the forum.

-Darwin (November 09, 2008, 04:36 PM)

Messrs. Darwin & qforce:

I wasn’t referring at all to Doc Fletcher, nor was I talking about something that needs to be reported to a developer as a suggestion. The programs that always open in a full window for me work fine on another computer. But when I set them up for a delayed start within Chameleon Startup Manager they always open full. It is a problem I only see with Chameleon.

Jim

[Darwin]

  Sorry Jim! Wasn't trying to put words in your, er, fingertips, though I *thought* that that was more or less what I said:

Jim was actually referring to Chameleon Startup Manager

-J-Mac (November 10, 2008, 05:48 PM)

[qforce]

I assumed that DocFetcher would need to be placed in Start in order to keep the index updated.
Was I assuming wrongly? If I was, there is of course no need for it to start minimized. But if I was right, and it needs to start with Windows, then it really should start minimized, because I would never use it until later  when I have finished reading my mail, etcetera.
Sure, a checkbox will be all it would take.
Thanks for asking! :-)

-Curt (November 10, 2008, 03:04 PM)

Nope, DocFetcher doesn't automatically update its indexes when it starts. However, there are plans to implement a non-java daemon that will take care of the index updates, and that won't display any annoying startup windows (I promise!  )