Via searchenginelowdown.comCopernic released their Desktop search program today.
Via a search box in the Windows taskbar, it allows you to search easily for:
· Pages & news on the Web with AllTheWeb.com
· Products on Copernic's shopping site
· Emails and Contacts
· IE history and bookmarks
· Any file on your system, including music, video and images
I have only lightly tested it but the results so far have been served up near instantly for me, and according to the F.A.Q., it shouldn't cause any slowdown on the system by only indexing when there's a low use of resources by other programs.
The image search is cool, displaying all results as thumbnails along with the dimensions and location on the hardrive. The music search is very effective also, it seems to be able to search within the id tags on .mp3's and there's an option to open the files in your default media player.
I was mainly looking for the ability to search within the text of my own files; and it seems to do this very well, but in the results, it doesn't show a snippet or any other information except for the filename and location.
Clicking the links allows you a quick preview in Copernic, but this is user-unfriendly to my mind because each result requires an extra click to get more information.
It is still a vast improvement on the terrible terrible search built into XP, and it allows you to find things efficiently, but I've recently seen the value in caching articles and pages I'm interested in on my system (like Furling to my hard drive) and a search engine with all the functions of a web search were what I was looking for.
I had hoped this would work well with the Slogger history cache, and it does index them without any problems, but the filenames generated by Slogger are pretty featureless (only the date and time the page was saved) so the results in Copernic don't give me much information about the files that contain my queries.
It is a very good piece of software all in all though, extensible to include any file types you wish to include, just in my opinion the results interface leaves out some basic features most people would expect from a search engine.
Added
Martin Bouchard of Copernic sent a message in reply to my comments above:
Thanks for your positive feedback on our Copernic Desktop Search software.
To solve the problem you mentioned "Clicking the links allows you a quick preview in Copernic, but this is user-unfriendly to my mind because each result requires an extra click to get more information", we would need to keep a text copy of all document in cache (like Google). This would take more space on the hard drive but would permit a quick abstract feature and even faster document previewing. We will probably have this implemented in the next version as an option for those who don't mind using additional space on their hard drive.
Also, the next version will probably have a full Web page history indexing function so you would be able to natively search the content of the pages you visited. We're also evaluating FireFox support for next version.
Check out Copernic Desktop Search here
Related software:
· blinkx - Another recently released desktop search program, suggests files based on what you're currently viewing, though less extensible than Copernic
· HotBot Desktop - The first desktop search to be released that plugs in to IE. also includes Web, history search and RSS reader
· Slogger Firefox Extension - Archive the full text and media of pages with this browser history extension
