Great review of Desktop Search software

Ars Technica has a great review of several desktop search software packages available currently. It really goes through good enough detail to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each software and matched my experience as well. The only ones here I haven’t tested are Copernic and Ask Jeeves. But the winner is my choice as well: MSN Desktop Search. This has consistently stayed on my desktop and laptop and I use it several times a day. It’s interface is clean and instant, with highly relevant results (beats google anyday) and indexes my OnFolio collections and OneNote files in addition to all the other stuff. My pet peeve is the size of its index which can hit 90MB in virtual memory. I admit to also keeping Yahoo! Desktop Search as well, although I don’t use it as often, sometimes its a life-saver simply because of the breadth of file types and content that it indexes. So, despite Google’s well-publicized release of GDS, it’s still far behind the two major betas MSN and Yahoo! Good luck next time, Google.

4 Responses to “Great review of Desktop Search software”

  1. Joe Cheng Says:

    Hmmm, are you sure your Onfolio collections are getting indexed by MSN? This isn’t possible as far as I know (yet… but we’re working on it).

  2. Vele Says:

    Well, it’s not ideal, but they are indexed. I’m using Onfolio Publisher to publish my collection to a local directory. Since this is essentially an HTML file, it’s indexed completely. When I search in MSN, I get index.htm (Main Collection) as a result, thus I know it’s in Onfolio. That’s the best I have so far.

    Ideally, you should have an iFilter for .cfs files. Then, MSN will automatically search and index them. Although, I’ll still get a Main Collection.cfs as a result that opens up in Onfolio.

    But, keep up the good work and thanks!

  3. Firefox Says:

    MSN Desktop Search and Onfolio

    Here’s a link to a good article comparing desktop search tools as well as tips on getting MSN search to work with Onfolio:…

  4. Joe Cheng Says:

    >> Ideally, you should have an iFilter for .cfs files. Then, MSN will automatically search and index them. Although, I’ll still get a Main Collection.cfs as a result that opens up in Onfolio.

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.