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Software Businesses Google The Internet

Desktop Search Engines Compared 361

Posted by timothy from the operating-system-handicapped dept.
nutterButter writes "After Google created a stir with its desktop search engine, other engines gained more awareness in the public eye. Slate did a comparison of them and Google was not their top pick; Copernic was. I tried it - and am quite impressed."
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Desktop Search Engines Compared More

Desktop Search Engines Compared

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  • Copernic... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tektek ( 829733 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:04PM (#11259821) Homepage
    Copernic is also the only one on TFA that can search Firefox.

  • Linux anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ewanrg ( 446949 ) * <ewan@grantham.gmail@com> on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:05PM (#11259826) Homepage
    Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux? Having Copernic rated #1 is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and Google is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and...

    I assume you get the picture :-)

    ---

    Yeah, I'm like this on my blog [blogspot.com] too ;-)

    • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by QuantumRiff ( 120817 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:10PM (#11259873)
      No, its got a pretty interface. To be accpeted by the linux crowd, it needs to be "GREP" with a combination of C, perl, shell scrip, and awk. Oh, and better be availble in RPM, tar.gz, and .deb. And it surely better use MySQL as a backend, with apache as the gui (if your going to have one.) We unix geeks like to demonstrate our knowledge by always doing things the hard way!

    • Some GNOME folks look to be working on it. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Chuck Chunder ( 21021 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:13PM (#11259900) Journal
      Beagle [gnome.org] is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for. Beagle can search in many different domains.

      The latest edition of the Beagle newsletter [beaglewiki.org] has just been released.
    • locate?

      I name files descriptively since I'm not locked to 8.3 case insensitive names ;-)

      Tom

      • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:3, Informative)

        by kirkjobsluder ( 520465 )
        Locate isn't bad, but for some applications you really need to have a content-based search that can't be accomodated by variations on grep. The grep family is great when you are dealing with text based files, but tends to run into problems with content like pdf and OpenOffice.org files.

        So for a practical example, I have about 120 collected pdf files of academic articles under filenames with the primary author and year. (I could put the title in there, but filenames between 16-25 characters seem to be rea

    • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:5, Informative)

      by ken_devon ( 549706 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:16PM (#11259938)
      Wow. The timing on this article is uncanny. I installed Beagle [gnome.org] yesterday, and I'm already addicted to it - it indexes documents, mail and web pages as they're accessed, and updates it search results in real time.
    • find | grep
    • Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux? Having Copernic rated #1 is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and Google is wonderful for folks still running Windows, and...

      Yeah... sounds like you need a Mac [apple.com]!

      Humorless Moderators: It was a "Joke" (tm) (c)

    • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by theantix ( 466036 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @10:21PM (#11260358) Journal
      To tell you the truth, I'm very glad that these sorts of companies don't yet write software for Linux. A free software solution like Beagle comes without spyware, doesn't send your information to their corporate masters, and doesn't shove ads down your throat or charge you money.

      Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today. It's almost a golden age now, knowing that the vast majority of Linux software is truly free libre software instead of the ugliness that freeware software will bring.

      • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2005 @05:42AM (#11262076)
        Someday I'm sure that these crapware vendors will be producing their garbage for Linux, and dumb Linux users will be plagued with much the same sort of problems that windows users suffer today

        Of course they will. Like them or loathe them, the adware authors are doing it for money, and so target the OS with the largest install base (all other things being equal). Once Linux or MacOS has a more appreciable market share, they'll be targetted too.

        Yes, Windows is more vulnerable to remote/local exploits, but that's not what we're talking about here - we're talking about trojans, malware-riddled software and other stuff that requires user intervention to get on to a system. If the hordes ever descend on Linux, so will the malware.
    • I tossed a couple of notes down thread, but two options for Linux users include ht://dig http://www.thdig.org/ [thdig.org] which presents exclusively a web based interface, and glimpse/webglimpse (see http://webglimpse.net/ [webglimpse.net] which provides both a commandline mode search as well as a web based search.

      Enjoy,

      -Rusty

    • Re:Linux anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by mcrbids ( 148650 )
      Is it too much to hope someone might build a strong tool for doing this that will run on Linux?

      Some years ago, there was a product called "Excite for Web Servers" or "EWS". It was very good - I used it to index several hundred MB of text on my fire-breathing, 166 Mhz Pentium back in the day.

      Unfortunately, it's getting real, real, real old and is almost impossible to get to work properly on a modern Linux install.

      It's an excellent product, distributed with sources. Unfortunately, without a sufficiently

  • Apple's coming out with something like this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:06PM (#11259836) Homepage
    It's called Mac OS X Tiger [apple.com]. If you've used iTunes, you know how good and how fast searching can be. It's going to be pretty awesome when it comes out.

  • history search (Score:5, Informative)

    by FrenZon ( 65408 ) * on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:08PM (#11259847) Homepage

    The biggest use (and what makes it a necessity for me now) I have for a desktop search tool is searching for a webpage I partially remember visiting a few weeks ago, but need more information from. GDS indexes the content of all pages as you visit them, making finding them relatively easy - as far as I could tell (tested over half an hour), Copernic only indexed title and URL, which was of much less use.

    A minor point for the geekier here - GDS can also be activated using quicksearch URLs from IE or Firefox, which is handy for those used to getting everything from one field.

  • Why is desktop search so hot? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:09PM (#11259858) Homepage
    I can't understand why the regular search function isn't enough. No, I'm serious. What do these products offer that a regular search cannot afford? Seems everyone is on the desktop search bandwagon these days.

    • The search that comes with Windows XP is a)ungodly slow b)often unable to find what you need and c)only searches file names. It can't search within chat transcripts, e-mails, or documents. Even if it could, Windows search does a terrible job of arranging the results once they have been found. There is great potential to improve upon the current local search.

      • Re:Why is desktop search so hot? (Score:5, Informative)

        by mOoZik ( 698544 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:20PM (#11259966) Homepage
        Actually, it CAN search inside of files, contrary to your post. The results can then be arranged by size, type, folder, date, etc. Isn't that enough?

        • I stand corrected. However, I do think the method and speed of searching could be improved.
          • Actually, my problem with it is that the indexing service feels free to run any old time, so gamers basically have to disable it, and it's slow as the proverbial molasses this month without the indexing service. However, it lets you do sufficiently sophisticated searches for most purposes and the results are just another explorer window so you can rename, move, delete files in groups or by themselves. This kind of integration is just one of the things that makes a unified interface better than a miscellaneo
        • Yes but you are forgetting point a. ungodly slow and it is. I strongly suspect if it didn't load that stupid dog or whatever it is that it would go a bit faster.
        • In their wisdom MS decided that search should ignore certain file types. Try creating a file that ends in ".java" and search for a string inside that file. Surprised?

    • Re:Why is desktop search so hot? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Every try using windows search to locate some piece of source code? Using Windows to find a document containing some piece of text is not very good. If you are just looking for a file named yyy or even *.jpg it is somewhat ok, but even then it has to traverse your entire directory structure.

      This means that if you want to find all mp3's on your in the twenty different file sharing programs, and didn't have the foresight to organize them all into one set of directories. Than windows is going to search every

    • Because in Windows, the standard file search typically works like this:

      1. Start -> Search... -> For Files and Folders
      2. enter some search terms in the "Containing text:" field
      3. click "Search Now"
      4. go get a master's degree
      5. come back to find a list of files that have nothing to do with what you were searching for.

      MS's standard search is really, really bad (though they claim that the new MSN Desktop Search [msn.com] fixes that) -- and forget about using it to find stuff stored outside the filesystem, like in your e

    • I have about 6 years worth (10 gigs) of old project files sitting on my hard drive. I use X1 and think its an absolute god send. Just type in a few keywords and X1 pulls up the file. I used to have to pour through a dozen levels of directories and rely on my rusty memory to try to find files.
  • What amazes me is why would anyone trust this sort of application? Other than a virus scanning program, I really don't want any application to have permission to scan, search, and index every file on my harddisk. I don't care what the privacy policies are ; it's not something I'm willing to risk.

    • Re:Why would anyone trust this? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Old Man Kensey ( 5209 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:14PM (#11259916) Homepage
      Assuming you're the kind of user with privileges to install this on your computer to begin with, every application you run already has those permissions. Any program you run has the same permissions you have when you run it, unless there are admin policies to the contrary in place. So, these apps don't inherently represent any more of a security risk than the ordinary search built into your OS.

      So, do you trust your OS vendor? If so, why, exactly? For that matter, do you really trust your antivirus vendor?

      • So, these apps don't inherently represent any more of a security risk than the ordinary search built into your OS.

        That's just so not true. When you install a good desktop search tool, it's like installing a spyware honeypot, whith only as much protection as the author of the search tool thought about putting in.

        The whole point of having an advanced search tool is because it's too cumbersome to find imprecise information on your system with the regular search tool. But what applies to you also applies

    • If you run a good enough system you would be running a firewall that would prevent the application from making any outgoing connections and then it won't invade anything. Then if you get scared at some point just find where the tool stores the data and delete it.
    • If there is *anything* that my computer can do for me, why would I want to do it myself?

      Maybe you don't trust Microsoft, but indexing and personal agents technologies are the futur.

      Don't have a closed mind.

  • the main problem i had with google (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jeff munkyfaces ( 643988 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:10PM (#11259871)
    is that i can only open the file i search for!

    i planned to sort out my music collection - so i searched for an artist - 87 results.

    can i select them all and move them to a folder in one go? no.

    for this kind of thing it's useless - i wonder if i can with copernic..

  • How neccessary is this for home users? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TheWart ( 700842 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:10PM (#11259877)
    Maybe it is just me, but for home users, is a tool like this really necessary?
    If you do not put things in directories, and are really disorganized, I suppose it would be, but I suspect that most people are at least somewhat organized when it comes to computer files...

    Then again, my perception may be skewed, since most people I come in contact with who use computers a lot are my college friends, and they are all pretty computer literate.

    • Re:How neccessary is this for home users? (Score:4, Funny)

      by savagedome ( 742194 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:19PM (#11259960)
      I suppose it would be, but I suspect that most people are at least somewhat organized when it comes to computer files...

      Like this [nova.edu]??
      • My friend's desktop has at least three "New Folder's" and who knows what they contain :x

        As for I, when on windows, because I went nuts with the organization of icons in windows on my desktop, I use Blackbox for Windows [bb4win.org] which brings the black/fluxbox minimalist shell to windows by replacing explorer and creates the iconless environment that I always loved.
    • As someone who works helpdesk...

      You, sir, are completely wrong :)

      Users HAVE NO CLUE where they put their files... ever.

      Now whether or not a search tool will help them find the files they save is another question...

    • Re:How neccessary is this for home users? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GlassHeart ( 579618 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @10:06PM (#11260257) Journal
      I am pretty anal about where I put my files, yet over the years those habits and preferences do change. Thus, I might've used 'personal' in 1995 and 'prj' in 2000 to refer to personal projects. Whenever I switch machines, I don't always have the patience to restore everything (particularly stuff like archived email) from the old machine in the right places, especially if it's something as major as a Windows to Linux switch. Instead, the old stuff live in a tgz file somewhere.

      Would I ever need to search old email? Probably. Do I want to remember where every single email program I've ever used stores its mailbox files? Hell, no. If done right, these search tools can be really handy.

    • I store ALL my data on the DESKTOP in semi-randomly named files (to the point that they all overlap into a seemingly bottomless pit of stacked icons). I NEED a search tool.

      Oh... and does anyone know how to bring your desktop background to the foreground? I can't see the nice green fields anymore ;-)
    • I generally make a point of correctly labeling my files, and making strong directory structures, eveything nessassary for good organization;

      Yet I still desire a tool like this. Why? Because I forget thing- I may remember that two years ago I worked on a programmign project that displayed all the pictures in a directory- but I don't remember the filename, the project it's attached to, or the date I last used it.

      I can search my programming directory, my backup directory, etc; eventually I'll find it,
    • this is especially useful for home users.

      Considering that these are people who get lost when a desktop shortcut vanishes - "who deleted solitaire?"

      They dont have to think about where files get saved to anymore - they dont even have to think about what app they used to create it - the desktop tools find it for them and all they do is click the web link.

      I also use Google desktop search (and Lookout), but google will be far better when they allow us to choose our own file extensions to search.
    • I'll give you a hint at what 98% of users will do when they save a file.

      Either
      A. Save it to My Documents
      B. Save it to C:\

      Subfolders are right out.

  • DT Search (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:13PM (#11259896)
    I've tried these so-called "Desktop Search" apps like Google and Copernic, but they're all crap. If you want serious desktop search, get something like DTSearch (http://dtsearch.com/PLF_desktop_2.html).

    Only problem is DTSearch is hella expensive at $200.

    But if you've got serious amounts of text that you need to search (I use it to search through 80gb of text on an external HD), its the only way to go.

  • SHHH!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by spac3manspiff ( 839454 )
    Dont tell Microsoft or they will get bought.

  • Enfish (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vivarin ( 106778 )
    Yesterday marked the tenth anniversary of my first day at work at Enfish, one of the very first desktop search engines. You can try it yourself at enfish.com. I also wrote part of the indexing system for what eventually became X1 at idealab after I left Enfish in 1999.

    Enfish has the best Windows integration, and X1 has a very snappy search. Enfish uses less memory for a large index and supports more data types.

    Linux types can always use glimpse or roll something themselves with Lucene (an apache project)

  • Desktop search unnecessary (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dogtanian ( 588974 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:29PM (#11260028) Homepage
    All desktop searches are redundant; well, under Windows at any rate.

    Simply use Google, which will have visited the web server on your compromised Windows PC- the same web server that is sharing everything on your hard drive with the rest of the world.

    I bet those Linux weenies are jealous now.
  • I cannot speak for the other search tools- but I can't say I am really too impressed with Google's desktop search. My problem was it was fairly limited in what it can search, although I am guessing it is the pet project of an engineer at Google- and that it will probably be expanded over time.
    Add thunderbird and msn support!

  • I had a major problem with Copernic (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geneing ( 756949 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @09:46PM (#11260132)
    I tried Copernic for about a week and then removed it. A major "showstopper" for me was that Copernic would lock files at random (indexing?). When I would try to delete a directory I would get an error that files are in use. It was happening way too often even after I limited the directories I indexed. Another problem was random slowdowns and explorer crashes. I don't have a proof that Copernic was at fault - only circumstantial evidence.
  • On Windows, my favorite is still Funduc Software's Search and Replace [funduc.com]. It let me do rudimentary refactoring long before the IDE's discovered it.

    Maybe it's a programmer-only thing, but I'm surprised none of the others will do replace (at least, if they do I didn't see it in the article).

    Garg
  • Has anyone tried Omea Pro?

    It's from the makers of one of the best Java IDEs, IntelliJ IDEA.

    Here's a link: http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/ [jetbrains.com]

  • FYI, Copernic contains adware. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Shanep ( 68243 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @10:27PM (#11260393) Homepage
    Copernic's Privacy Policy [copernic.com] reveals that, "Copernic Technologies, Inc. works with third parties that transmit advertisements to the Copernic Agent and Copernic Desktop Search product families and Copernic Meta."

    • Couldn't one simply use software like ZoneAlarm or Kerio PF to deny the programs access to the 'net?

    • Re:FYI, Copernic contains adware. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Scutter ( 18425 ) on Tuesday January 04, 2005 @11:55PM (#11260860) Journal
      Copernic's Privacy Policy reveals that, "Copernic Technologies, Inc. works with third parties that transmit advertisements to the Copernic Agent and Copernic Desktop Search product families and Copernic Meta."

      It also says this:


      # Keywords and result contents processed by Copernic Desktop Search
      Copernic Desktop Search does not allow transmission of keywords or result contents to Copernic Technologies, Inc. or any of its partner for searches conducted by the user on his computer or corporate or home network. If the software ever requires collection and processing of data, such as user's profile, location, search history, fields of interest and tastes, these data should be processed only by the user's computer and not be transmitted deliberately to Copernic Technologies, Inc. or any of its partner.

      I'd like to know how they reconcile the two. CDS does interface to web searches, though, so perhaps that's what they use.
  • How much of a slowdown will these programs hit WinXP with?

    My machine is an otherwise speed-demonish laptop with a 4200 RPM hard drive, and I multitask like a demon... between fullscreen, 512-ram-using games and the Windows desktop.

    Needless to say this causes a whole, whole lot of disk thrashing.

    Do these desktop-search programs access the disk enough to compound my disk-swapping woes?

    (On that note, I have a 7200 RPM external disk. Is there any way I can get WinXP to use it for at least some swap, or put
  • I used copernic way back when their web based search tool still worked with google. I found that their tool greatly simplified my web searching workflows. Although, when they switched their UI to the XP look and feel, I lost interest. Besides loosing google groups searching, The user interface went too many steps backwards to be comfortable to use.

    It's nice to see these guy's back on the map again.
  • I guess it will take time to figure out advance and unique features of Copernic, but some obvious rants can be:
    1. No thunderbird support
    2. Why would I need to allow cookie from copernic if it is a *desktop* search?

    Good thing is that it has firefox/mozilla support, which takes care of your browsing. Default options are set non-aggressively (like searching history is checked off by default, which is insightful), and this is something really good : option of NOT searching images smaller than 16x16 pixels, mus
  • <shameless promotion>

    For those OS X users interested in thematic keyword search (either in desktop docs or on the Web), take a look at theConcept [mesadynamics.com]. Copernic Agent is a somewhat similar product.

    </shameless promotion>
  • I you want to search network shares (yes, not just Intranet sites) with a browser or Web Services, follow my sig ;-)

  • How big are these databases these create? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by iamwahoo2 ( 594922 ) on Wednesday January 05, 2005 @11:04AM (#11263471)
    I have been wondering what exactly these things index? If they index every single word of every document, I would assume that the overall database becomes enormous, not to mention it must take awhile to create the index. Anybody have insight into what these databases are actually doing?

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