Desktop Search Overview

To search the World Wide Web, you simply visit a site like Google, MSN, or Yahoo! and type in a keyword or two. But if your PC is like most, it's stuffed with huge numbers of e-mail messages, documents, spreadsheets, and the like, with no quick, easy way to find any of it. Thankfully, this is changing. In recent months, several companies introduced free applications that let you search your desktop as easily as you search the Web—and in some cases, even more quickly. We put eight of the most notable free products to the test in PC Magazine Labs, as well as four programs that still cost money. Two of them, blinkx and Filehand, are start-ups, but the rest are familiar names from the world of Web search: Ask Jeeves, Copernic, Google, HotBot, MSN, and Yahoo!.

An overview of software that brings search (e.g., Google) from the Internet to your desktop.

I have not used these products yet, but the day is not far away when the nedd and desirability to "get my arms around" the now gigabytes of data on my hard drive. In enterprises, the ability to support workgroup and project collaboration makes this technology an easy case to make.

Peter S. Kastner