Yes, + 1 from me - absolutely re the issue of the longevity/turnover of SI (Search/Indexing) tools in the market.
It has been a source of frustration to me that some perfectly good SI tools have been introduced into the market and then ongoing development/support gradually ceased without any real explanation as to why that happened. They fall into a class of software that has been termed
"abandonware".
Two SI abandonware tools that occur to me are ADS (AltaVista Desktop Search) and GDS. From what @JavaJones and/or @Josh write, maybe Everything is about to join that class too?
One of the first to go that way - that I recall - seemed to be ADS - refer
AltaVista’s Local Desktop Search Re-Emerges…I started using the GDS ß and stuck with it during all its problems and until it became rather good. I was a bit miffed when Google informed us recently that they were going to abandon GDS, but I accepted the fact and de-installed the tool. However, when I was upgrading to Win7-64, I thought I'd give the inbuilt SI - i.e., WS (Windows Search) - a whirl and so turned on indexing for my main hard drive. It took a while for WS to build its index in the background, but once it had done that it seemed to pose no real system overhead or annoyance that I could detect - which seemed to be very different to my experience of the horror of the built-in Win XP SI.
(I sometimes wonder what difference - if any - having the new 7200rpm hard drive may have made, as opposed to having the old 5200rpm one.)
I do not easily praise Microsoft, and so, having played about with WS a fair bit by now, I think they deserve praise. I discovered that WS seems to be almost
"too" good (better than GDS) - it will search
everything, including stuff you may never need. After I spent some time
tuning it (GDS was never able to be so easily fine-tuned), it seemed to be able to perform faultlessly. Furthermore, Microsoft has been consistent and persisted with improving its inbuilt OS SI and integrating it with its own products (e.g., Outlook, OneNote) and ensuring that it can look into common third-party archive file formats (e.g., .ZIP).
What I miss though is the ability that GDS gave to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your
other PCs, giving you an index for
nearly all your disparate files/data. That was something potentially very useful.
So what?
Well, experience/history would seem to indicate that desktop indexing/search providers have been able to produce some excellent stuff, but they seem to be relatively "impermanent" and cannot be relied upon indefinitely. (I don't understand why this might be.)
Thus, putting an interface or plugin to FARR to use your index/search tool of choice is a useful way of accommodating that as a fact of life.
If FARR were to have its own built-in SI tool, then that would arguably be re-inventing the wheel as far as WS goes - which is apparently a perfectly good wheel, so why bother to expend time/effort in developing and supporting a good third-party imitation?
Just my opinions/needs here:- Personally, I don't want/need to run two SI tools simultaneously whilst one of them gets out of ß and up to speed either. It would probably be an unnecessary/avoidable system overhead, though possibly of academic interest. (I would be interested in it, at any rate.)
- I don't see the need to inadvertently or otherwise turn FARR into some kind of self-contained comprehensive GUI for the OS either. The OS already has one. FARR (and a lot of its plugins) seems to fit as a superb niche player, making up for the deficiencies/inefficiencies of that OS GUI. Windows' IS (WS) does not seem to be one of those deficiencies/inefficiencies.
- If FARR could somehow replace that ability that GDS gave (to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your other PCs, giving you an index for nearly all your disparate files/data), then I could be seriously interested. (That would be heading towards PIM nirvana for me.)
