Desktop Search Insanity
I like to be able to find my stuff quickly. I like to be able to do it without extraneous
results. Unfortunately I need to be able to search three very disparate groups of data completely separately.
In order of frequency searched:
- Email (only certain folders) and some folders under My Documents.
- Various batches of code: my own, sample code, ….
- 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?
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September 5, 2007 at 8:26 pm | Greg M
I am pretty sure Google Desktop Search would do everything you want.
http://desktop.google.com/features.html
July 22, 2008 at 1:19 am | Veera
I use google desktop search for this purpose. Its pretty good and fast!
July 22, 2008 at 8:51 am | 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.