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What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
gorinw13:
the poll seems to be outdated. Is the Copernic Desktop Search really good? or the information is obsolete?
CWuestefeld:
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.)
-qforce (February 09, 2009, 01:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
I've tried to organize my stuff (email, documents, and photos) hierarchically through folders in the filesystem. But it just doesn't work. The problem is that even in the most vanilla cases, a given object falls into multiple buckets. A given photo might belong in "Photos of Cathy", "Mexico 2008 Vacation" and "Sunsets". A given document here at work might be related to both the customer that instigated the work as well as the subsystem that needs to be customized.
Keeping multiple copies, one in each applicable bucket, won't work. You wind up changing alternate copies and creating multiple divergent versions, rather than a single version that contains all updates. In theory you might use links within the filesystem, but I don't know of any tools for any OS that makes this manageable.
The only alternative is to search the objects themselves, whether that means a full content search or just a search of tags in the objects' metadata. And I've found that, while I'm always wishing for better tools, I am able to accomplish my needs successfully with what's available today.
J-Mac:
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.)
-qforce (February 09, 2009, 01:08 PM)
--- End quote ---
I've tried to organize my stuff (email, documents, and photos) hierarchically through folders in the filesystem. But it just doesn't work. The problem is that even in the most vanilla cases, a given object falls into multiple buckets. A given photo might belong in "Photos of Cathy", "Mexico 2008 Vacation" and "Sunsets". A given document here at work might be related to both the customer that instigated the work as well as the subsystem that needs to be customized.
Keeping multiple copies, one in each applicable bucket, won't work. You wind up changing alternate copies and creating multiple divergent versions, rather than a single version that contains all updates. In theory you might use links within the filesystem, but I don't know of any tools for any OS that makes this manageable.
The only alternative is to search the objects themselves, whether that means a full content search or just a search of tags in the objects' metadata. And I've found that, while I'm always wishing for better tools, I am able to accomplish my needs successfully with what's available today.
-CWuestefeld (February 09, 2009, 03:38 PM)
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Well put, CW. I agree to an extent with qforce's comments about creating a good folder hierarchy. I am pretty fanatical with my folders - and I have a heck of a lot of them! I currently have my system and programs on a WD 80 GB drive, my data on two 500 GB internal SATA drives, and backups on two external drives: a 500 GB USB Seagate and a 250 GB firewire Maxtor drive. But I run into problems exactly like you described. Many files fall into multiple categories and I start to get lost looking for them.
Thanks!
Jim
aenache36:
The first case is AND, the second one is OR.
-qforce (February 09, 2009, 01:08 PM)
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Greetings.
What would be the required syntax if one tries to find documents that contain certain strings?
As much as I knew
"word1 word2"
was suppose to that job whereas
word1 word2
is the equivalent of AND, do please correct me if I am wrong.
Regarding creating and maintaining hierarchies I must admit that somehow I always knew that this isn't for me, I simply don't have the patience for that. In my particular case I have thousands of documents that have a meaningful description at the folder level only and filenames like: Part1.doc, Part2.doc, etc OR complex documents that contain multiple subjects (and that's where proximity search comes very usefull for narrowing down the big initial list...) so it's not even worth trying...
All the best.
qforce:
Greetings.
What would be the required syntax if one tries to find documents that contain certain strings?
As much as I knew
"word1 word2"
was suppose to that job whereas
word1 word2
is the equivalent of AND, do please correct me if I am wrong.
-aenache36 (February 10, 2009, 02:56 AM)
--- End quote ---
Just give me a second to check the Lucene documentation... ah, here it is: http://lucene.apache.org/java/2_4_0/queryparsersyntax.html
DocFetcher is based on Apache Lucene, and therefore supports all operators described on that page. As for the AND operator, yes, there is one. Example: "some string" AND "some other string"
As for the problems with the hierarchical file system, have you guys considered "albums" and similar features which are provided by decent picture managers and media players these days? This is basically a way to put files into multiple categories. I never used that sort of thing, though, because of the potential risk of vendor lock-in (meaning that all that categorization data is lost when I move to another program).
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