Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
What is the currently best Desktop Search software?
Shades:
To be honest, I never was a big fan of 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.
Quite some time ago IBM and Yahoo! offered their OmniFind search engine software for free with a (rather generous) limited data set size, exceeding that limit and payment would be required. At the time I had a spare PC lying around so I tried it.
It still runs, it is a set-and-forget solution that indexes all kinds of document types at timed intervals using a separate PC. For on-the-fly searching files and/or their content on my desktop PC I use BareGrep, as I find it's speed very good. For the rest I trust on the search engine.
Now I know that the search engine has been discontinued, but until now I didn't see the need to change it or look for an alternative. However, you might be lucky to find the executable and the manual somewhere on the interweb.
If you are interested in a similar solution, look at this DonationCoder thread for an alternative.
J-Mac:
I'm now using Agent Ransack and it does indeed find text buried deep within documents - and it does it rather fast, too.
Jim
michaelkenward:
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 (September 21, 2013, 03:02 PM)
--- End quote ---
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 (September 21, 2013, 01:45 PM)
--- End quote ---
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.
Darwin:
dtSearch is awesome! I've been using it for years - I like it because the previews and overall interface are nicer than Archivarius (own a license for that, too) and because it is less resource intenstive and produces a small index file. What I like about both dtSearch and Archivarius is that you can opt to run index updates manually, in fact, with dtSearch, that is the default setting. Finally, dtSearch is great because as noted the resource hit is negligible. I recently revisited X1 and wish that I could say the same thing... As xtabber noted, dtSearch is way too expensive for home use, though...
J-Mac:
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 (September 21, 2013, 03:02 PM)
--- End quote ---
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 (September 21, 2013, 01:45 PM)
--- End quote ---
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 (September 22, 2013, 06:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
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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