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Desktop Search Tools

With ever larger hard drives permitting desktop computer users to keep several years of documents, e-mail, photos and other data on their PC, the folder metaphor of organization is breaking down. As a response, support for full text indexing and retrieval on the PC Desktop has taken off recently with most of the major search engines offering free tools. Desktop search offers users the ability to quickly find related material across source domains using one integrated search interface - material they often may not remember having. The following is a listing of the major "free" offerings for each common desktop platform.

Linux

There are more options than one might imagine for the Linux Desktop. The most promising is Beagle. Sun Microsystems did a comparison of Beagle, JIndex, metaTracker and Strigi.

• Beagle. Sponsored by Novell; part of the Gnome desktop. We have documented our own experience installing and using Beagle on Fedora 7 and earlier.
• Google Desktop Search for Linux
• Jindex
• Kat. Part of the KDE desktop. While Kat looks like a promising alternative to Beagle, file type support is currently much more limited than Beagle. At the same time, development is proceeding rapidly. RPMS for Fedora Core 4 are available as of Version 0.6.3. Install kat0-0.6.3-FC4.i386.rpm & kat-0.6.3-FC4.i386.rpm. The installation program will notify you of optional (but recommended) programs needed to extend Kat.
• Recoll
• Meta Tracker
• Strigi is another solution for KDE.
• ZOË. Born as an e-mail search system, version 0.6.3 also supports PDF, RTF and MS Word doc files.
• Namazu. Supports MS Word, PDF and TeX as well as text and mail files.
• regain. As Beagle, regain is based on a variant of the Apache group's Lucene. Read a brief review.
• Estraier. Appears to be limited to indexing web sites on local hard drives. [Java]

Macintosh

The main player in this space is Apple.

• Spotlight
• Google Desktop Search for Mac

Windows

There are many options for windows. See the additional resources below for others.

• Copernic Desktop Search. Number one in a comparison done by the University of Wisconsin.
• Google Desktop Search. See the additional plugins available to extend search functionality.
• MSN Desktop Search
• Yahoo Desktop Search. Based on technology licensed from the highly rated X1.

Small and Medium sized businesses

Search is now becoming a commody for business

• IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition. Supports up to 500,000 documents. Windows and Linux versions. Launched as free software download in December 2006. A commercial edition is available for higher indexing needs.
• Google Mini is Google's search appliance for small businesses. Indexes 220 different file formats. Limited to 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 documents total, depending on cost.

Additional Resources

• Wikipedia Desktop_search
• Benchmark Study of Desktop Search Tools: An Evaluation of 12 Leading Desktop Search Tools (University of Wisconsin E-Business Institute)
• Find it fast: desktop search programs (ZiffDavis Net UK)