Best Free Desktop Search Utility

For me Copernic Desktop Search Home is useless ,i tried it for one week ,when i write something in its search bar to search, It unable search file each and every time.
' EveryThing ' is far-far better than Copernic Desktop Search Home.

In your second note about Upgrading to Windows 7 64bit you stated that you would "see no reason for to use a third party desktop search tool." I disagree. I typically save stuff to either a mapped network drive or my local drive and sometimes both depending on what I am saving. Windows 7 search utility still only searches local drives and by default Windows Search will not index the contents of a file. I need a search utility that does both transparently without much configuration at all.

very good article. thank you kendall.
I use both 'Everything' and 'Locate32' simultaneously.
'Everything' is light and very fast and no more features.
'Locate32' is powerful and full featured.

Google desktop = not in the race
Copernic Desktop = I have used this for 1-2 years and just installed it in favour of windows 7 search.

1) Copernic forces you to log in to the email server. When offline the this is a pain.
2) Main problem it doesn't index closed pst files.

3) Win 7 is heaps faster than copernic and seems to use less resourses.

I have only been using Win 7 for 3 months but it seems it wins hands down'

how to use Ultra File Search in better way?

I think... first, search all files or search in computer. Second,after get search result,press ctrl+F to search in search result. So,you don't have search in long time again, just use ctrl+F then search what do you want. But cannot search new file which not in search result. So,you must search all files which take a long time.
in fact,search all files with ultra file search is faster than agent ransack if without file indexing. And ultra file search has better search option.
Thanks

Saying that the Windows 7 search works perfect is nonsense. I cannot get it to find files that I know are on my system. There is no way to set the search filters the way you did with XP. For that matter, there is no way to set W7 to use most of the filters that were available in XP. So there is no way to tell W7 what it is that you want and what it is doing wrong.

There is definitely a need for either a third party search tool or for Microsoft to admit they screwed up and fix the W7 search tool.

Great topic; fabulous discussion.

I have a first gen Solid State Hard Drive in my PC; indexing must be disabled for those drives. As a result, my Windows 7 search tool is seriously handicapped... :(

So which software do you Gents advise me to use instead?

Copernic 3.5.0 doesn't close when shutting down computer
See the last posts on http://forum.copernic.com/topic.php?id=315 to check whether the shutdown trouble has been resolved since. For the moment however, no solution seems to exist.

OCR's document indexing is the only reason I keep Google Desktop Search now, given its serious indexing limitations noted elsewhere in this discussion- which increase as the index size increases- is the Omnipage plugin. That allows on-the-fly indexing of imaged documents.. yes, OCR indexing.

Any other freeware options for that?

Oh, and GDS's sidebar doesn't autohide if IE9 is installed... (Vista 32bit).

Agent Ransack finds vs Locate32
I recently did a quick 'test' of Agent Ransack vs Locate32, searching the same folder for the same text within a file. Agent Ransack found 4 more (about 4%) more files. (And yes, Locate's database was up to date).

very good job so far kendal.
been using everything for a couple of years it is very good in its limited scope (searching for file name).

I'm looking for an app that could index and allow me to organize (and search) in my growning library of books and articles, mainly medical, mainly .pdf (some .CHM's). Last I checked this amounted to over 4000 books (average 3-5mb) and 6000 articles (avg 1-2mb). I would like: index name and content, search boolean, see preview, etc. I would love: automatation, specially in assigning file name, extracting isbn number from withing file, etc.

any recomendation?
(please point me correct forum if this is not the case.
thanks.

Very good thanks. Just what I wanted Caernic was too much,this is simple and effective

Silly website saying this to me Your submission has triggered the spam filter and will not be accepted.!!!

Now I'm using UltraSearch. It's like Everything, but without indexing and a bit better 64-bit support. Still not native 64-bit, but I like how it lets me opt-in drives instead of opt-out, as well as it's active development.

How about Quick Search? (http://www.glarysoft.com/products/utilities/quick-search/)

Thanks.

none of these are adequate to my needs.

I want a search that does NOT index my drive. I want it to find in files with a regex, the option to exclude certain file types (binaries), the option to ignore everything in a .svn directory, the ability to find and replace across files on disk, and I want the path of the file and the line where the found text occurs in a list. I want to be able to double-click that list and have it open to that exact line.

I notice that Google have annouced that Desktop is going to be discontinued from 14 September 2011.

http://googledesktop.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-desktop-update.html

Leaves this category wide open once again

;(

I loved the old W98 (still the best Windows of all time) search (which I believe is continued on the XP version). (I don't have the machine with 98 and XP and NT on it up at this time, may have the os details reversed.)

In W98, you had a popup box. Inside was a box for a Filename and a box for Contents. You could use the Filename plus Contents to search for filenames with those contents. (I think there were some other features like date and size, too)

So, if I were looking for a file called "my apples", I would type that into the file box - without the quotes, of course. If I wanted to find what files contained the word "apples", if I just typed in apples, then files like "food", "purchases", "meals", and of course "my apples" would show up.

Also the search from the W7 menu collapses after clicking on a found item. The search from the Computer icon on the right of the program menu, which pulls up a Windows Explorer type window, usually returns to the original search - though often it will do it over. But the biggest payoff from going to the trouble of using the W explorer search is that you can open a found Folder IN A NEW WINDOW!

And what idiot gave the file display function and the Internet browser the same name?

However, I know the the Windows Explorer window can be made nearly as good as the W98 one - if you are willing to go the trouble for typing in the UNDOCUMENTED keywords like "name:my apples", just like the filter does the date search. However, as I say, (1) it is undocumented and (2) it is a big pain to use.

So please bring back the functionality and simplicity of the W98 search.

Also, I would like to have some SQL ability, like AND, OR, and NOT.

(Oh, and a word about XP. I "upgraded" from W98 because because W98 won't read flash drives - despite the usb ports. I dual partitioned my drive for XP. Actually, I already had NT as well. Fortunately, I had a second disk drive, but I had to install more ram. Well, one of the XP upgrades that I downloaded over the internet, overflowed the partition I had set up for it and so mangled my machine that it took me months to get it working right again. Despite working again, XP is still like a donkey in a pony show.

I have W7 because I needed a machine that worked and so I bought a new one, an HP Compaq at $300 (sans monitor) I still can't get anything out of the plug for the speaker though - good thing I don't want to listen to music. I also used my W7 machine to connect me with MS service and I brought my other machine back to life after about 4 months.)

Best,
erbos

Is there a way to search on networkfolders without making them offline available?

I use w NAS to store my music and I want to search with the microsoft search on the NAS.

There is a patch for 32 bit to add networkfolders to the search but I didn't find this patch for 64bit.

Another free and open source desktop search utility:

http://www.miner-mole.com

It has a portable version too.