What is desktop search?

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Many thanks to those of you who commented on my earlier posting about desktop search and to those of you who emailed me privately. Your feedback is very helpful. A couple of people have asked me to explain what desktop search does. Put very simply, it searches for information and files on your desktop PC. You download a program to your machine, tell it what to index and set it going. The first time it runs, it does take a while to index your files. These may include cached web pages, word documents, emails, audio, video, IM, PDF etc. depending on the desktop search you choose and the settings you stipulate. Some programs combine desktop with web search.

The types of files indexed by these programs varies and, for those of us using non-Microsoft programs, support for applications such as Open Office/Star Office, Thunderbird and Firefox is an important factor. But there are other criteria and features and I shall be covering some of these in my presentation.

So why not use the built in Windows Search for files and folders? First of all, you must make sure that is set up correctly. In some versions of Windows, the Search option appears "broken" because of the default settings. For details and instructions on how to fix it see "Making Windows XP Search do what it says on the tin - almost" in the December 2004 issue of my newsletter Tales from the Terminal Room. (Note: this is nearly a year old so some of the comments at the end of the article are no longer valid.) The second problem is that if you have disabled the "Indexing Service" it takes an age to find file names containing your terms and an eternity to search the text within files. And it does not search inside files that have extensions that Windows does not recognise as being associated with text applications. It will be interesting to see what Search can do in Vista, the next version of the Windows operating system.

Do I use desktop search on a regular basis? Erm, I have to confess I do not. Yes, I do have desktop search on my PCs but my documents and emails are organized into folders and sub-folders so it is rare that I "lose" a file. I do, though, sometimes forget where I have saved a file, and there are times when I want to track down the different versions of a document or I have forgotten whether I really did get around to downloading that really interesting PDF newsletter. For me, desktop search is not essential but it is a useful utility which does save me time on certain occasions.

Posted by KarenBlakeman on October 25, 2005 12:41 PM | Permalink

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Comments

hi karen
how do you feel about the security issues around desktop search?

isn't it a worry that google, msn et al are indexing the contents of your pc?

Posted by :suki | November 23, 2005 1:17 PM

The one that most people have concerns about, as do I, is Google Desktop. And it is more a local legal issue rather than the fact that Google is indexing your PC. Google Desktop creates a plain text cache of the documents that it indexes. When you delete a file, a copy of that file remains in the Google Desktop cache. There is a Remove function but it is not straightforward to use and you can never be sure that it has removed all versions of the document or email. In the UK at least this has implications under Data Protection and Freedom of Information legislation and is why Google Desktop is specifically banned in some organisations.

Karen

Posted by :Karen Blakeman | November 26, 2005 11:33 AM

My desktop search does random.

It displays text search results
in context or matching lines only.

It can flash through my oldie pics
(700+ black & white) in 35 seconds.

It can show me thumbnails (3 sec)
of all my videos on a drive.

I include it on my backups with
it set to auto run.

Desktop search and net search are
from the opposite ends of the
search spectrum.

Posted by :Doug Pederson | April 1, 2006 4:13 PM

I use Google desktop. Works great. I'd reccomend it to anyone. without it, designing my work would be a real pain lol.

Brad,
http://www.sellitbuyit.ca

Posted by :Free Classifieds. | May 28, 2007 9:20 PM

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