by on August 29, 2007 in Tools

Desktop Search Insanity

I like to be able to find my stuff quickly. I like to be able to do it without extraneous image results. Unfortunately I need to be able to search three very disparate groups of data completely separately.

In order of frequency searched:

  1. Email (only certain folders) and some folders under My Documents.
  2. Various batches of code: my own, sample code, ….
  3. Blog Posts (I use Attensa for Outlook - so blog entries look and behave like email).

Unfortunately no one of the desktop search tools I know of allow my to say only search email and documents. The closest I’ve found is X1 (free edition) which allows me to search only files or email etc. But it doesn’t provide me a way to separate my categories.

So far the best solution is to index my regular email and files with X1 and my code/blog entries with Copernic. Now my blog entries still pollute my code index – but at least when I want to search only my email that’s all I do.

Does anyone have a better solution than running multiple search engines? All I want is a search my data sets separately?

Be Sociable, Share!

Related posts:

  1. In search of a Great Password Plugin for Firefox
  2. Is LinkedIn useful? Hardly
  3. Remote Desktop Pain
  4. Urlseek.vmn.net or the Evil that is Hidden in Toolbars
  5. Free TShirt: Tigger says "Your code is suboptimal – that’s what Tiggers like best"

Certified ScrumMaster TrainingIf you enjoyed this post take a look at Certified ScrumMaster Training. We currently have courses scheduled in Ottawa and Edmonton.


  • http://codetempest.blogspot.com/ Greg M

    I am pretty sure Google Desktop Search would do everything you want.

    http://desktop.google.com/features.html

  • http://veerasundar.com/blog Veera

    I use google desktop search for this purpose. Its pretty good and fast!

  • Mark Levison

    Veera – thanks for the reply. The problem with Google Desktop Search and all the others, is that they don’t allow the user to exclude a batch of files. In my case I would like the source code of various projects indexed – but most of the time I don’t want it appearing in the search results. Currently the only way to do this is to have search engines – which is silly but that’s exactly what I do.