Puggle is another third party desktop search utility that is offered as a portable version and an installer. The software creates an index of the file structure of the computer system on its first start and will update that index whenever it discovers new files that have been added or modified afterwards.

The user can customize the indexing options of the desktop search tool. It is possible to change the index directory path, add or remove folders or hard drives that should be indexed, change indexing options to include or exclude thumbnails and text information and specify the file types that should be indexed.

The search form at the top provides the search capabilities of Puggle which can be further filtered by category. The search results are displayed with the file name, path to the file on the local computer system and thumbnail and text previews if that option has been enabled.

A double-click on an entry will load the file in the default program viewer for that file type.

Puggle has a few flaws that become obvious after some usage. It will for instance display only ten results per page which can become tiresome if lots of results are displayed. Another problem is that there is no option to add file types to the list of files that can be searched by the desktop search software.

Both the installer and the portable version of Puggle can be downloaded from the developer’s website at the project hosting website Sourceforge.

Like the name suggests it starts off by displaying everything – that is all files and folders – of a computer system. It eliminates all files and folders that do not match the search query of the user in the instant the key is pressed. What this means is that thousands of file names and folders will be displayed at the beginning, for example 1.5 million on a Windows XP test system.

Entering characters will reduce that amount drastically so that the required files and folders will be left in the end. To ensure that all files and folders have to be added to the index at start. It might take a minute or two depending on the amount of files. The developer mentions that indexing 1 million files will take around 1 minute. The index will be stored on the computer’s hard drive in the same location that the file was launched from. The one million indexed files and folders take up about 5 Megabytes of hard drive space.

The desktop search tool uses between 50 and 60 Megabytes of computer memory and about the same mount of virtual memory while running. The items can be sorted by name, path, data or size.

The search supports Boolean expressions, wildcards and regular expressions. The faq contains a helpful list of the expressions that can be used in the search.

Another interesting aspect of Everything is that it can launch an HTTP server so that users can search for and download files.

Everything will run on Windows 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista and can locate files and folders on local NTFS volumes.