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What is the currently best Desktop Search software?

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J-Mac:
The warning in red atop the reply text box is telling me to start a new thread because this one is so ancient.... but after all, I am a professional thread necromancer!

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So anyway... I guess everyone is perfectly satisfied with their desktop search engines? Since no one sems to be posting about them anymore? There didn't appear to be any consensus winner here. E.g., the poll shows Copernicus as very popular, but I think that those votes were mostly before it became what it is today: a "Pro" version with less features than the older free version had.

Has X1 died? I hear almost nothing about it anymore. WDS is still hit or miss for me. Sometimes it finds items that amaze me and other times it misses very obvious searches. I also dislike the search bar being in the Start menu. Can that be changed? If you lose focus on the Start menu you often lose the search too. I hate that!

Thanks!

Jim

Carol Haynes:
How do you lose focus on the start menu - just press the windows key on the keyboard.

Personally I have given up using any of the alternatives - I really like X1 but had lots of problems with it - especially in the days I used Outlook. I couldn't definitively prove it but I seemed to suffer a lot with corrupted PST files when it was installed and it magically resolved when I got rid of it.

cyberdiva:
So anyway... I guess everyone is perfectly satisfied with their desktop search engines? Since no one sems to be posting about them anymore?
-J-Mac (September 06, 2013, 11:21 PM)
--- End quote ---
Over the years, I've tried a number of different desktop search engines.  Copernic, Yahoo Desktop Search, Archivarius, and UltraFinder come to mind, but far and away my favorite is File Locator Pro.  None of the other search engines I've tried comes close.  (I'm not counting Everything Search, which is my go-to search engine if I'm simply trying to locate a file and I know all or part of the filename.  But Everything doesn't search file contents, whereas the others I've mentioned do.)

File Locator Pro doesn't index, so it doesn't consume system resources and is always current.  And while it can be slower than an indexing search engine, it can be set to be very narrowly targeted.  I've also found it much easier to use than Archivarius.  In my experience, if FLPro didn't succeed in finding something, that something almost certainly wasn't on my computer.  There's also a free version of FLPro called Agent Ransack, which is very good, but I've opted for the commercial version. 

rjbull:
far and away my favorite is File Locator Pro.-cyberdiva (September 07, 2013, 07:25 AM)
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I've had good service from BareGrepPro, but it is after all primarily a grep, and often I want Boolean searches.  Archivarius does well for me, but I don't index it often enough.  It would be nice to have a DC discount on FLPro.

TaoPhoenix:

I tend not to need search inside capability, but I don't exactly use a desktop search per se. I still stand by the slightly unusual method of doing a drive read via Karen's Directory Printer, and then searching the resulting text file! Doing the drive read from the "desktop down" takes some five minutes. And then good ol' Control-F in the text file finds stuff *instantly*!

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