Kerkia

Background

Desktop search tool are like Bing or Google Search but for your desktop. They hence allow you searching through all your files, emails, favourites, network drives, etc. for files from their name, content, etc.

Recommendation

Our recommendation or this category is the excellent Exalead Desktop tool. It runs from within your internet browser and sits in your tray, indexing during idle time or otherwise if you so desire. The tool is a bit slow to start but the search is very fast and the results are very good, arguably even better than Google’s (see below). We also like very much the way results are presented and the post-processing you can perform on your search such as excluding sources and folders, search within your search results, filter on types, dates, etc.

We believe Google Desktop is an equally very strong tool in this category today. Its interface is browser based too but it also includes a search toolbar you can activate anytime pressing Ctrl-Ctrl as well as a nice integration within Outlook for searching through your emails. Results are displayed in your Internet browser like would results from a web search, although with additional capabilities to filter out by the type of files found, though its post-filtering and processing capabilities are not as strong as Exalead’s. The tool is is very fast and very reliable, and the indexing is also truly transparent to the user.

Copernic Desktop Search Home (http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/home/index.html) is a pretty very good alternative for those who prefer a wholly integrated user interface.

finally, we’d like to recommend small utility that only searches by inspecting file names, not file contents, but is so fast, both in indexing and in searching, that it is worth using instead of the above tools in many cases. This utility is named Everything.

Web links

Exalead Desktop

Web site: http://www.exalead.com/software/products/desktop-search/

Download: http://www.exalead.com/software/products/desktop-search/

Google Desktop

Web site: http://desktop.google.com/

Download: http://desktop.google.com/

Everything

Web site: http://www.voidtools.com/

Download: http://www.voidtools.com/download.php