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DeskRule: A new kind of desktop search engine is born (ß testers wanted)

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IainB:
Thought I'd post this from the zabkat.com blog (home of xplorer²) in case anyone on the forum might be interested helping out in ß testing on this new approach to search:

(Copied below sans embedded hyperlinks/images.)
DeskRule: A new kind of desktop search engine is born

Nowadays it is amazing how much information there is in your everyday documents. Take your photos for example, the "new" property system introduced with windows vista has no less than 86 properties for photos, and that's not counting the GPS geo-location information also available for pictures. Modern phones and advanced cameras add all this information in EXIF and XMP tags and the property system distills such tags into standard properties.

You may argue that if you own just the one camera you are not interested in the System.Photo.CameraModel property. Most of these are just for professional photographers. But how about searching for pictures with particular people in them? Say pictures of your daugter? This is possible because windows exposes automatic face recognition data inserted by your advanced camera or photo software in System.Photo.PeopleNames property. Likewise you can search by GPS coordinates to find pictures taken at some particular location, e.g. your latest trip in australia. Isn't it a waste of information when you only search by name?

The most powerful search tools of today — even xplorer² — are stuck using traditional shell column handlers which only expose around a third of the available properties. That is why we went ahead and wrote from scratch a new kind of search tool that taps into all the available properties, for photos, media and documents. It also offers traditional name/date/text content search. Its name is DeskRule and today you can have a go trying its capabilities.

This is pretty much work in progress but it has reached a point where it is a usable search engine so we are presenting it to you for your feedback and beta testing, which will help decide the future of its development.

Click to download DeskRule (free beta version, 500 KB)

Minimum requirements: windows Vista or later
   deskrule main window

DeskRule is still rough around the edges and rather slow, but things will improve in the near future. Unlike xplorer² which does "everything and the kitchen sink" file management, this is going to be a tool focused on just one thing, searching for files and folders. The general ideas are:

    Search everywhere. Wherever you have files DeskRule can locate them; not just normal folders, but also in mobile phones and cameras, zipfolders, FTP and all the other virtual folders available in the shell namespace.
     
    Use all item properties. Some 300 (windows 8) unique system properties are available to be used as search parameters, both simple (name, date modified, file contents) and more advanced like Rating, Tags, Authors, even GPS.Longitude.
     
    Powerful search expressions. Search rules are individually powerful supporting regular expressions, and can be combined in complex search statements (boolean algebra) e.g. you could search for files with pin-point accuracy like:
    name="report" AND NOT (date="last month" OR rating="4 stars")

Here is a demo video: play

Your comments and suggestions (or bug reports) are very much appreciated, thanks!

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TaoPhoenix:

I dunno.

Per the Info Mgt threads, I put about six keywords into my file names. About 1-3 times a year I do a "drive read" into a text file. Then searching the text file is over 20 times faster than Win Search.

So I'm not sure what this new approach has to offer. I don't do many obscure searches.

tomos:
It's an interesting idea - especially for photos (for me anyways).

The interface might just scare me off (video), it seems to me to be so fundamentally geeky and unintuitive. I can say that - but unfortunately I dont have any talent in the direction of offering/suggesting alternatives... [edit] fundamental GUI alternatives I mean [/edit]

IainB:
I dunno.
Per the Info Mgt threads, I put about six keywords into my file names. About 1-3 times a year I do a "drive read" into a text file. Then searching the text file is over 20 times faster than Win Search. ...
-TaoPhoenix (February 23, 2014, 11:35 AM)
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I don't think I understand that. Why do you bother with the text file? If you effectively have your metadata tags/keywords in each file's name (i.e., in the filename of each file that you wish to have metadata tags in), then can't you more simply/easily - and possibly more quickly - make a dynamic search of the actual file names of that population of files at any point in time, using something such as (say) Everything?    :tellme:

...So I'm not sure what this new approach has to offer. I don't do many obscure searches.
-TaoPhoenix (February 23, 2014, 11:35 AM)
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I'm not sure either, yet, but I think the idea is to feed back comments such as these to the developer - which can be done in the discussion forum here: blog: here's deskrule, a new kind of desktop search engine

These are the posts there so far:

Jibz:
It's an interesting idea.

I have to say though, in situations where I need to search on more specific metadata than what the filesystem offers, I often have domain-specific software that handles this better.

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