Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

<< < (140/181) > >>

Armando:
Thanks for sharing Innuendo. It's encouraging.

sajman99:
I'm not ashamed (much anyway ;D) to admit I use an old open source app named Wilbur on my XP machine. I doubt it works on Win7, but maybe some talented coders here at DC can get the source and make it compatible. :tellme:

Wilbur may be old and plain-looking and officially "retired", but on my XP system he still works with blazing speed and accuracy. After indexing all my data for about 3 minutes, I can then use Wilbur as a file searcher (ie. Everything, Locate32, etc.) or as a full desktop/grep searcher. I particularly like that this little app isn't constantly thrashing my HD--I manually update when I choose to.

I have successfully searched .doc(x), .rtf, .txt, .htm, .mhtm with Wilbur--no idea on .djvu but I wouldn't be surprised if it worked. Wilbur claims to support .pdf (via pdftotext) but I didn't like the way it left temp files and substantially increased the database size so I no longer use it on .pdfs (especially now that File Hound works very well in that regard). Also, I should mention I don't search email so I've no idea about that capability.

btw I tried Wilbur's successor Wilma a good while ago, but I couldn't get it to function as a file searcher (IIRC) so I stuck with good 'ole reliable Wilbur.

Wilbur is now located here:  http://s3.amazonaws.com/redtree/wilbur/index.html
successor Wilma is here: http://s3.amazonaws.com/redtree/wilma/en/help/index.html

Just remember first impressions aren't always accurate. When I first checked out Wilbur I distinctly remember thinking "I'm not using this outdated ****". Well, I've been happily using it ever since.

J-Mac:
Hmm.... I haven't had Archivarius installed in about 8 months, so maybe things have changed (or you've got a much bigger OST than I do), but using Direct Access it used to "rip"  ;D through updating my 400MB OST index in about a minute and a half. BTW, I agree about the Outlook being open vs closed issue - I finally went with NOT having scheduled indexing of my OST file and did it manually whenever I could remember to do so.

I wish the developer would implement COM indexing...

Armando - what OS are you currently running? As noted above, when I switched to Vista, I finally moved to WDS and haven't looked back.
-Darwin (November 30, 2009, 02:13 PM)
--- End quote ---

I am using WDS on Windows 7 and IMO it seems to miss a lot. Not sure but I think it excludes a good many folders. I have searched for file names, gotten 0 results, and then browsed around where I thought I might find the file and found it on my own. It is very fast but as I said it seems to skip a fairly large number of folders. Or it just doesn't find them?

Jim

Carol Haynes:
Have you installed WDS on Win7 or using the version built in? The Built in version only searches indexed folders by default but you can override that and search all folders.

cyberdiva:
Have you installed WDS on Win7 or using the version built in? The Built in version only searches indexed folders by default but you can override that and search all folders.
-Carol Haynes (December 23, 2009, 03:05 AM)
--- End quote ---
I recently put Everything on my new Windows 7 netbook, and it seems to work very well.  Frankly, I've been so delighted with Everything on WinXP that I never considered using anything else.  I still haven't decided what to use on Win 7 for searches within files, but I find that even on XP, where I have Archivarius, I tend to need to find stuff by file name a lot more often than by content.  That surprised me.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page