Comments on: Desktop Search: More and more….

By: I. Alexopulos

I. Alexopulos — Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:30:32 +0000

If you are disappointed with GDS or afraid of possible privacy damage or just having fun of trying something new – diskmeta.com desktop search engine.

diskmeta indexes user-selected folders on local and intranet shared hard drives to search in PDFs, archives ZIP, RAR, local Microsoft Office files, CHM, HTML, TXT.
Nice details – it allows wildcards, boolean operators, exact phrase search, sorting, filtering, easy file preview.
In search speed and result presentation compares to Google in the best sense of the term.

Minus: diskmeta.com isn’t free. But you can try a full-functional version free for 30 days, just to make the right choice.

diskmeta doesn’t searches Internet. For Internet you have the unbeatable Google

By: Rick

Rick — Sat, 16 Oct 2004 01:53:10 +0000

Well I am not too happy about Google desktop right now.

It installed fine, but an hour into its indexing it trashed windows and my internet connection and totally hosed IE.

Only after uninstalling it and two hours of work do I have my machine back. I think in the rush to beat its rivals Google pushed the product out too early.

Rick

By: Kendall Willets

Kendall Willets — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 03:11:21 +0000

pb, I don' t mean to toot my own horn too much, but my iBook already has OS X's "mini http server" (Apache) wired to a search app that I'm working on. Hanging a daemon off of an http port is a common way to get something working without writing UI code.

This method is also highly portable, so there's some hope for Google to cross-compile their thing for other platforms.

The rest of the tech sounds fairly standard - a big inverted index, consuming a big chunk of storage. A crawler that grabs your idle time and memory. Ranking based on date.

Anybody finished indexing yet? How big is the index?

By: Scott Kingery

Scott Kingery — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 00:51:40 +0000

I like it so far. One thing I’m not sure of is whether it indexes attached devices like USB drives and so forth. Also, it currently doesn’t support Firefox and Thunderbird. It works with Firefox as far as searching and having the Desktop link but it doesn’t index your cached pages.

By: Matt Hicks

Matt Hicks — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 00:11:15 +0000

Interesting discussion. It's worth noting that Google is planning to open desktop search to plugins through an API so other apps can be integrated and to make Gmail work with it.

By: pb

pb — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 23:53:17 +0000

The “seen it before” gets tiring. Has anyone seen desktop search integrated right into the public web site? Has anyone seen a mini http server placed on their Windows box? 1 second response times? Sort by relevance? How about all this for free? Like just about everything else, the basic idea is not new. Like much of what Google does, the implementation is impressive.

By: Kendall Willets

Kendall Willets — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 19:50:21 +0000

It’s not so much desktop search as it is Windows-only Outlook, AIM, and IE search, plus the Office trio of closed formats. The platform coverage is minimal.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:54:34 +0000

Well, once you’ve installed GDS it indexes the text of pages you view through your web browser. Wouldn’t Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, etc. be included in that?

By: Eroc

Eroc — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:42:11 +0000

I hope this integrates with Gmail pretty soon. It seems like it would be pretty simple to do- just send the same query it’s sending to the desktop search or to google to my gmail account.

By: Michael Wexler

Michael Wexler — Thu, 14 Oct 2004 18:39:51 +0000

So many desktop search tools, in fact, that I recently made a list of the ones I've been considering and reviewed them. Check out

http://www.nettakeaway.com/tp/index.php?id=107

to see my list, and then look through some of the more recent posts to see updates.