Open Source Desktop Search Applications

I had mentioned about open source desktop search tools before.
Today I found few desktop search utilities from sourceforge.net These applications are similar to the more popular X1, Google Desktop Search(GDS), Copernic Desktop Search(CDS) and Yahoo Desktop Search(YDS). Most of them are based on Apache's Lucene search engine a open source search engine. Its supposed to be fast and has a very small memory footprint.

I was able to run and try out DocSearcher. Its very simple and intuitive and seems to be OK for the list of supported file types it indexes. I was able to index my drives/folders very fast which are all in GBs.

The other one is MaxFisher and I was not able to test it out as I failed to get a search result. It comes with a small webserver called Jetty as the search results and query boxes are presented in a web browser, almost similar to GDS.

Both of them are in Java(hence run anywhere where theres Java) and the GUI seems to be very simple. They still have a very very long way to go before they can catch up to the functionality or features the other desktop search utilities provide. But yes its definitely a start and am looking forward to the later releases of these applications. It should not be long before we see stiff competition from them to the closed alternatives.

I would be looking at things like "search as you type", indexing of PST (Outlook mails) and auto indexing before I can permanently have them on my machine.

Find the two new open source aplternatives to desktop search in the list here...

Happy searching till then.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Just found another one: http://sourceforge.net/project/docfetcher
Cheers

Popular Posts