Desktop Search Competitors


Summary: Competitors to Windows Desktop Search

All these products work on (at least) Windows 2000 and Windows XP, and index (at least) Office documents and Outlook email.
* Goebel Group has a nice feature summary of their differences.
* Slate has a review of Ask Jeeves, Copernic, Google, HotBot, and MSN
* Kalio.info has a feature and performance evaluationSearchComparison/ of Google, Copernic, Yahoo!, Windows and ISYS

Ask Jeeves Desktop Search


Beta, free to download

http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123097/2094037/2111640/TN_AskJeeves.jpg

Blinkx


Free to download

http://www.blinkx.com/media/overview/broadband.gif

Copernic Desktop Search


Free to download

http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123097/2094037/2111640/TN_Copernic.jpg

Google Desktop Search


Beta, free to download

http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123097/2094037/2111640/TN_Google.jpg

HotBot Desktop


Beta, free to download

http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123097/2094037/2111640/TN_HotBot.jpg

X1 Desktop Search


Free trial

http://www.x1.com/images/products/numbered_screen.gif

This image is of the OLD version. X1 has a new version in public beta right now. They add an Explorer toolbar, an Outlook toolbar, new client interface, search all and by more file sypes, and a lot more. One thing you can see, even from the old interface, X1 does preview. This is a huge feature and really makes finding things easy. They also allow fine grained detail of control of search in OL folders

Does anyone have a screenshot of the new version?

Yahoo Desktop Search


Beta, free to download

http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/tb/yds/features1-1.jpg

This is based on technology from X1. Discuss it on the Yahoo Desktop Search Community

AppRocket


This is the first Desktop Search that I tested. I remember it worked flowlessly and I loved it. This was a year ago. Most haven't even heard of it and I think it should have deserved a lot more coverage since it was there much before Microsoft even tought about instant searching. A year ago when i tested it was at version 1.2 and now, a year later it's still same version. Some problems with using abit too much RAM. Else I can't remember much except that it was great. Check it out for yourself and mayybe explain to me why it got no coverage even tough it apeared so early.
http://www.candylabs.com/approcket/

Ava Find


I just found this and it seems like it's older then AppRocket. Approcket and Ava FInd are not really competitors to MSN Desk Stearch but more like what we had before this flood of desktop sedarching products. Both of them are instant. Check it out for yourself:
http://www.think-less-do-more.com/avafind/


Gumshoe Desktop Search


Early alpha build, written in Java and Open Source (GPL). Built on Lucene/Luke (Java search engine), tagsoup (can parse malformed html as though it was XML) and SWT (Standard Widget Toolkit, part of Eclipse tools).
http://gumshoeds.sourceforge.net/

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