When you first start the program you will notice that two program windows are opened. The first window lets you configure the search parameters, the second displays the results.

When you look at the search window, you will notice that it offers a lot of search options. You only need to select at least one base folder for the search though to get started, as everything else is optional. The program supports multiple base folders for the search, as well as file, folder and extension exclusions. You could for instance search only for doc or docx files on all hard drives and partitions connected to the computer. And while those options are handy enough, you can use the program to search for file contents in text or binary form as well.

That’s still not everything there is to search. How does searching in alternate data streams sound? Or parameters that take the file size, file attributes or creation, modification or access time into consideration?

SearchMyFiles stops by default after the first ten thousand matching files it finds, with an option to set a different limit or no limit at all.

The Search Mode menu defines how results are displayed in the search window.

• Standard Search – Displays a list of files matching the query.
• Duplicate Search Mode – Will display only duplicate files in the search results.
• Non-Duplicates Search Mode – Displays all files that are unique.
• Summary Mode – Displays information for each folder included in the scan.

All search modes share the same layout. Details are displayed for each result, including the file or folder name, location on the computer, size and time related information.

The program comes with the usual Nirsoft tools to create HTML reports and to export the data to text, xml or csv files.

One interesting option, available under Options > Open File on Double Click, allows you to open any file in the search results listing with a double-click. This can be handy to verify duplicate files or to open the file that you were looking for.

A command line version supporting the majority of search parameters is available as well.

Windows users can download Search My Files from the official Nirsoft website. The program is offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version.

The portable freeware Dropout for the Windows operating system is a search tool that has been designed for exactly this purpose. All you basically need to do is to place the program executable in a directory, for instance the root of the USB drive or your Dropbox folder, to have a sophisticated search application at hand when it is needed.

Dropout displays a search form right on the startup screen. You can use it to find files in the particular directory structure or switch to the more advanced search under the advanced tab.

Dropout indexes all files that are stored in its root directory structure and saves the search information in a folder that it creates in root. The program indexes the contents of some text based file types like txt, pdf or doc so that content matching results are displayed as well in the results list.

The searching itself usually takes less than a second after the initial indexing. The search supports the query parser syntax of Apache Lucene which includes boolean operators, wildcards and grouping options. Search examples provided by the developer on the program homepage include:

• Tests NOT NUnit – Finds all instances of the work Tests but NOT with NUnit
• Scripts AND Tests – Requires the words Scripts AND Tests
• Dev* – Words starting with dev, i.e. Development, Develop, Devious, etc
• type:doc AND Tests: Searches for the word Tests only in *.doc files
• modified:201109* – All files created from September 2011
• modified:[201105 TO 201106]: Files modified between May and June 2011

Results can be sorted by all values including name, modification date or containing folder. The search tool furthermore assigns a score to each hit and makes those scores sortable as well.

A double-click on a file opens it in the default viewer for its file type. A right-click displays a context menu with an option to open the containing folder in Windows Explorer.

The advanced search form offers to search contents, file names, types and filter the results by a start and end modification date.

Windows users can download Dropout from the project homepage over at Codeplex. The program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0. It is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Alternative search tools are Everything or Locate.

By using certain operators and searching syntax, AQS allows for a significant level of precision with search results. As long as you learn the operators, you will be able to find specific results rapidly. This syntax is a gateway to specified search parameters. This saves time and overall effort. When a file needs to be found, the basic Windows Search option will work, but generally you are presented with a list of possibly related files. You would have to sort through the search results list to find the right file. AQS hones this down and gives you the control to quickly find specific files and applications. The syntax is easy to learn and need only be applied to awaken the AQS potential within Windows 7.

As in the screenshot above, open a Windows Explorer window and search for a term. “Microsoft” was selected in this search and it was narrowed down to the Documents folder as the selected area for the search. The following screen shot is a search for “Reader” on the main hard drive (C :).

This comes up with many different files. This user is looking for Screen captures, so eliminating the term “Adobe” would be favorable in order to find an SC Reader file. Simply add a dash before words you wish to eliminate from the search results.

This yields all files without “Adobe” attached to the filename. The SC file was discovered, as were other important files that may be of use. The point is that the search option changed and the simple syntax entry of (-) before a term negation will alter the search parameters.
Similar to Google, if you want to search for exact phrases, use quotation marks. In this example, the user has documents on social commerce. Social commerce is entered in quotations in the search field.

Apparently the file has multiple copies in a few different locations but it was found quickly nonetheless. Windows Search does not discern between letter cases, so the lettering in the search field is not case sensitive. These are the AQS operators involving text searches:

• NOT/- : Using “not” in addition to a prefix dash tells the search to exclude items in the following term.
• AND/+ : “And” and the prefix of the plus sign aims the search to solely include items matching both search terms.
• Use quotes (“”) to filter for a specified term or phrase

You can take this even further by using search filters. You can search by Kind, Date modified, Type and Size.

Some alternatives to using the mouse include the following syntax:

• search terms >mm/dd/yy
• search terms datemodified:mm/dd/yy..mm/dd/yy
• search terms date:past month

This is just an introduction to Using Windows 7 Advanced Search Operators. There are many options for searching with syntax. Some examples include:

• size:>=4mb < 12mb
• modified:September…yesterday
• type:music bitrate:>=180kbps

This is a phenomenal feature in Windows 7. The ability to use natural language in a GUI advanced search is definitely a wise addition to the geek toolbox.

Third part desktop search tools like Everything and Puggle offer speed advantages and a lower resource usage, which makes them attractive for many of Windows users.

Ultra Search is right on pair with those third party search applications. The desktop file finder can be installed, but is offered as a portable version as well. It operates without constant background indexing or search services.

It achieves its speed by working directly on the Master File Table. First results usually appear in the program interface in a second or less. It may take several seconds before all results matching the search term are found, but it is possible to work through the already found files in that time.

file finder

Each result is displayed with its name, file path, size, last access and change date.

The standard mouse operations are available. A double-click launches a file directly from the search tool. A right-click displays options to open the containing folder, perform file operations like copying, and other Windows Explorer related context menu options.

All connected hard drives of the system are displayed with statistics in the footer. Each hard drive is listed with its total size, free space and the percentage of free space.

Ultra Search finds files only on the main Windows partition by default. Other hard drives need to be enabled in the footer area so that their contents are searched by the program as well.

The search results can be saved in txt, csv or Microsoft Excel format, which can be interesting for archiving purposes or results processing in other applications.

The results can also be copied to the clipboard or printed if a printer is connected and installed on the computer.

Ultra Search is a fast file finder for the Windows operating system. The program could use additional filters to filter the search results, a portable version would be great as well.

We have reviewed our fair share of desktop search tools in the past from Everything and Index Your Files to the desktop search tool Puggle and Doc Fetcher.

Agent Ransack is another search software for the Windows operating system that is provided as a 32-bit and 64-bit version. Unlike most of the other tools it does not need to index files prior to running searches. That’s good for the application’s resource footprint but means that the search speed is lower than those of search engines that make use of indexing.

Searches can be started right after installing the program. Filters aid the user in finding files faster on the computer system. It is for instance possible to search for a filename, specify directories, minimum and maximum sizes as well as dates (modified, created, last accessed).

The search tool supports regular expressions and can search the contents of supported files as well which takes longer than just searching for file names. Agent Ransack can search all file types, even binary files, for relevant text entered in the search form by the user of the application. Adobe PDF, Microsoft Office (including Office 2007) and OpenOffice documents are specifically supported by the search software.

A regular expression tester is included in the application to aid inexperienced users with the configuration of their searches that make use of regular expressions.

Agent Ransack is an interesting alternative to the desktop search tools mentioned above. Its file search is relatively fast as long as it is not searching for text in the file’s contents. It is recommended to limit the directory as narrow as possible to speed up the search processing.

The software program is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. It can be downloaded from the developer’s homepage over at Mythicsoft.

SearchFilterView is a new Nirsoft application that can be used to list the installed iFilter plugins of an operating system. The portable software program will display the installed iFilter plugins automatically after startup.

The program lists the iFilter filename, file desciption, file version, product name, company, path, class IDs and registry time in its interface.

The selection of any iFilter in the list displays the registered file extensions that can be searched thanks to the plugin.

The software offers the standard Nirsoft reporting options. It is possible to create html reports from selected or all iFilters and to save selected items to the local computer system.

Another interesting function is the ability to add or remove extensions from installed iFilters. This can be handy for instance if two iFilters support the same file extension.

SearchFilterView is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. This includes support for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The program can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

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.

But one feature you might not know exists with Beagle is the ability to search across your internal LAN on other Beagle-enabled machines. This makes for an amazingly handy way to search for files across multiple machines without having to run around to every machine on your network. With one of the later releases of Beagle, you can enable remote searches. In this tutorial I will show you how to set this up and how to run a search across your network.

First and foremost, make sure you are running a recent release of Beagle. Do this by open up your package manager and see that Beagle is, in fact, the latest version. If you have any security measures on your network, you will need to open up port 4000 so that the Beagle machines can see one another. Once you have those tasks done you are ready to set up Beagle. I am going to make this simple by only setting up two machines for this feature: Desktop and Laptop. The information you need to know:

LAPTOP

• IP address: 192.168.1.15
• Hostname: jlwallen-laptop

DESKTOP

• IP address: 192.168.1.100
• Hostname: jlwallen-desktop

Let’s set up the desktop first. Follow these steps:

1. Open up Beagle on the desktop machine.
2. Click on Search > Preferences.
3. Click on the Data sources tab.
4. Make sure NetworkServices is checked.
5. Click on the Network options tab.
6. Check “Enable web interface for local search services”.
7. Check “Allow external access to local search services”
8. In the Index Name text area enter “Desktop” (no quotes).
9. Click OK.

You will have to come back to this section in just a moment. But first go over to the laptop and run through the same steps as above, only insert “Laptop” (no quotes) where you see “Desktop”. Once you have that done, come back to the desktop and follow these steps.

Figure 1

1. Open up the Preferences window again.
2. Click on the Network options.
3. Click the Add button in the Networking section.
4. From the list of currently available hosts, double click the host named “Laptop” (see Figure 1).
5. Click OK on the Preferences window.

Now go back to the laptop and run through the same steps (above) to add the Desktop host. Once you have done this close Beagle on both the Desktop and the Laptop and restart both.

When Beagle has restarted you are almost ready to search. But before you do you have to tell Beagle to include the Neighborhood in its search. To do this click Search > Search Domains and check Neighborhood.

Figure 2

Now when you run your search it will include a search on the remote machine. Figure 2 shows a search for the string “beagle” as run on the laptop. For this test I created a file called “beagle_desktop” on the desktop machine and “beagle_laptop” on the laptop machine. Figure 2 shows both files.

Congrats! You now have remote searching set up in Beagle.

Final thoughts

Beagle is one of the more flexible search tools on any desktop. Give remote searching a try and Beagle will probably become your favorite search tool.

Windows users need to create a new file in the location they want the search shortcut to appear. This can be the Windows desktop or any other location on the computer system. The file needs to be renamed so that it makes use of the .fnd extension, the file name itself does not matter in this case at all. You can for instance create a text document and rename it to search.fnd.

A click on the newly created file (e.g. search.fnd in this case) will directly open the Windows search interface. This is usually faster than having to use the start menu search option in the operating system.

And the best thing is that GNOME Do is just as easy to use as it is to install. And in this tutorial you will learn just that: Installing and using GNOME Do.

Installation

Installing GNOME Do is simple:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software application.
2. Search for “gnome do” (no quotes).
3. Mark the selection for installation.
4. Click Apply.

That’s it. After the installation is complete you will find GNOME Do in the Accessories sub-menu of the Applications menu.

Configuring GNOME Do

One of the first things you will want to do (outside of just randomly attempting things with GNOME Do) is to configure GNOME Do. When you start up GNOME Do you will be surprised to see nothing happened. Before you think something is wrong, take a look at your Notification Area. You should see the GNOME Do icon (see Figure 1).

Figure 1

The GNOME Do icon (in the example above) is the first icon to the left edge of the Notification area (Directly to the right of the vertical double dotted lines). You can open GNOME Do by either single clicking that icon or by clicking the default key combination for opening GNOME Do. The default combination is <Super>Space Bar. If you’re not sure what the “Super” key is – it’s the Windows key on most keyboards.

Figure 2

When you open up GNOME Do a simple window will appear in the center of your screen (see Figure 2). From that window you will want to click the small drop down in the upper right corner to open up the GNOME Do  menu. From this menu select Preferences.

When the Preferences window opens there are three things you should take care of:

• From the General tab select “Start GNOME Do at login”.
• From the Keyboard tab configure the shortcut you want to use to call up the application.
• From the Plugins tab add any plugins you might want included in your GNOME Do setup. You will definitely want to enable the Files and Folders plugin as well as the Locate plugin.

How to use GNOME Do

Using GNOME Do is simple, once you get the hang of it. Here’s how it works.

1. Enter the key combination to bring up the GNOME Do window.
2. Type the text for whatever it is you want to start or find.
3. When the item you are searching for is found, hit the Enter key.

Let’s examine how to find a document on your machine and then open it with OpenOffice. The document will be called ghacks.png. To find and open this file follow these steps:

1. 

   Figure 3

   Open up GNOME Do by hitting <Super>Space.

2. Type “locate” (no quotes).
3. Hit the Tab button.
4. Type “ghacks.png”.
5. Hit Enter.
6. When the new GNOME Do window opens, click the down arrow on your keyboard until you see the specific file name and click Enter (see Figure 3).

The file will open in the default application for that file type.

Final thoughts

Of course there is so much more you can do with GNOME Do. In upcoming article we will talk about using GNOME Do with Twitter, Web Browsers, Google, and more.

The Google desktop is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac. In this article I will discuss installation and use in the Linux operating system. In Linux, Google Desktop works in both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments. The installation is simple and the use is just as simple. Let’s take a look.

Getting and installing

You will not find Google Desktop in the repositories for your distribution. What you can do is head over to the Google Desktop Download page and click to download the version that is right for your distribution. Currently Google offers x86 and x86-64 RPMs (for Red Hat, Fedora, SuSE, and Mandriva)  and x86 and x86-64 DEBs (for Debian and Ubuntu). Make sure you click on the correct type and architecture for your machine.

Most likely, when you click on the download link, your distributions package installer will open to install the file. If it does not just download the file  and then install the package via command line. If you have to install via command line open up a terminal an issue a command like this:

For RPM:

rpm -ivh /path/to/download/*rpm

For DEB:

dpkg -i /path/to/download/*deb

Where /path/to/download is where you downloaded the file.

At the end of  the installation a window will appear where you will have to agree to the license. This window will also give you some brief instructions on how to get started with the Google Desktop. Basically it instructs you to log out of your desktop and log back in. Once you have logged back in you only have to double click the Ctrl key to open up the Google Desktop tool.

Using Google Desktop

There are three ways to open up the Google Desktop tool:

Double click the Ctrl key.

Double click the Google Desktop icon in the system tray.

Click on the Google Desktop menu entry you will find in the Google Desktop sub-men of the Applications (or “K”) menu.

Figure 1

When you do open up the Google Desktop tool you will see the small window you see in Figure 1.  To use this tool you simply enter your search string in the text area.  By default the Google Desktop is set to

Figure 2

search the web. You can change this setting by right clicking the Google Desktop icon in the system tray (see Figure 2). When you right click this icon a menu will appear that contains a sub-menu titled “Default Search Type”. In this sub-menu are:

• Web
• Desktop
• I’m Feeling Lucky
• Images
• Groups
• News
• Maps

Obviously this is geared toward Google.

Figure 3

When you enter a search term you will be presented with a partial listing of matching items on your PC. Figure 3 shows the results of searching for the string “linux” (no quotes).

What is really nice about this tool is when you click on a search result the appropriate tool will open. For example: If I were to select the first result in Figure 3 (google-desktop-linux – which is the Google Desktop deb file I just downloaded) it will open the package installer to install the tool.

Configuring the tool

When you right click the Google Desktop icon you can also select the Preferences entry. When you do this a browser window will open to a local preferences page for Google Desktop. In this window you can configure:

• Local indexing.
• Define local folders to include (or exclude) in searches.
• Remove deleted items from search results.
• Configure your Gmail account for searches.
• Display results.
• Change your hotkey.

Final thoughts

If you do a lot of searching on your desktop and the web, you should considering adding the Google Desktop into the mix. It’s easy to use, reliable, and searches just about everywhere (especially Google!)

Update: Google Desktop, just like many other Google Labs projects are no longer available.

TheSearchMan definitely falls in the second category with its tiny size of 19 Kilobytes. The portable desktop search software program can be executed from any location of the Windows operating system. It provides a very basic search interface that allows users to select a folder and search term. The program will then display the search results in its interface with the possibility to open the containing folder or files directly from the search results.

One of the most important features of TheSearchMan is the ability to perform a second search that only searches within the search results to refine the search results again.

It is possible to use wildcards to replace one character (?) or multiple characters (*). The search is performed fast, probably not as fast as in search engines that make use of a database or other means of storing file information to increase search speed. It does usually take a few seconds to display the results which is perfectly acceptable for most uses.

TheSearchMan will not search within files. Users who do need that functionality might take a look at Locate32 which offers that. TheSearchMan on the other hand is a lightweight – most likely one of the smallest if not the smallest – desktop search application (50 KB unpacked) that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

All of this comes in a tiny panel applet that is simple to install and simple to use. How easy is Deskbar to install and use? Let’s find out…

Getting and installing

The Deskbar applet will be found in your distributions’ repositories most likely. So all you will have to do is either fire up your Add/Remove software utility or a terminal window. If you opt for the GUI tool you will install like so:

1. Open up the Add/Remove software utility (such as Synaptic or gpk-application).
2. Search for “deskbar-applet” (no quotes).
3. Select the resulting deskbar-applet entry.
4. Click Apply to install.

If you opt for the command line you can open up a terminal window and enter a command such as:

apt-get install deskbar-applet

or

yum install deskbar-applet

You will see no visible sign that Deskbar has been installed because you hav to add it to your panel.

Adding Deskbar to your panel

Figure 1

If you right click your GNOME panel a menu will open contining the entry “Add To Panel”. Selecting that menu entry will open up the Add To Panel window where you will select the Deskbar entry and click the Add button. When the Deskbar applet is added you will see the icon as shown in Figure 1 (the panel icon on the far right.)

Configuring Deskbar

There isn’t too many options to configure with Deskbar. The most important options will be to enable the various plugins you want to use as well as add your Twitter username/password (should you want to use Deskbar to post to Twitter.) To do this right click the Deskbar icon and select Preferences from the menu.

Figure 2

From the Preferences window you will see three tabs and a few buttons (see Figure 2). The first thing you will want to do is scroll through the list of Extensions and decide if you want to enable or disable any of them. To enable an Extension just click the checkbox so the checkmark appears. To disable an Extension click the checkbox so the checkmark disappears.

You can also move an Extension up or down the list so that a particular extension gets priority for searching or action. And finally you can configure an extension by selecting it and click the More button. For example, in order to configure your username/password for Twitter you will need to select the Twitter extension and press the More button. In this new window you will enter the credentials for your Twitter account. The More button only appears on Extensions that have configurable options.

Using Deskbar

Figure 3

This is where it gets simple. Say I want to search my machine for the sting “linux”. Click on the Desbar icon and the text area will open up for you to enter your search. As you enter your search string the Deskbar window will expand to reveal various options (see Figure 3.)

As you can see there are a number of options available:

• I can execute a command
• Search for “linux” with Beagle
• Lookup “linux” in my dictionary
• Post “linux” on Twitter.

Depending upon what Extensions I have enabled there will be more or less entries.

Final thoughts

Deskbar will quickly become your best friend on your GNOME desktop. Making use of this handy app will help to make your desktop life much more effient and simpler. My only hopes is that other desktops (such as Enlightenment) will follow suit and create simillar apps.

Another difference between DocFetcher and other desktop search engines is that the former was designed to index document folders only and not an entire hard drive. This means that the initial setup of the document search engine is more time consuming as the user has to point the application to specific folders on the computer’s hard drive that contain the documents that should be indexed by the program.

The advantage of this method is that the program uses less system resources and is able to offer a better result quality. A few options are available to filter the result list. It is possible to specify a minimum and maximum file size, select some or all of the supported file types and locations that have been indexed by the desktop search tool.

Search results are displayed in the same interface with their title, size, filename, type, path, author, modification date and score that is computed by DocFetcher. A left-click on any document will load a preview of the document’s contents in a preview area in the interface which is great for accessing information of documents quickly as the search term is highlighted in the preview of the document.

DocFetcher (via Essential Freebies) comes as an installer or portable version for the Windows and Linux operating systems. It requires Java to be installed on the computer system.

Tag 2 Find uses a different approach. It brings the tags known from indexing websites to the computer desktop. It is currently available in a preview version for the Windows operating system. Users who have been using services like Delicious and Flickr or run their own blog will be immediately comfortably with the software program. Any file located on the computer system can be tagged by the user. No user would want to tag all files as this would mean to work with hundreds of thousands of files which could take a lifetime. The software program can assist the user by automatically suggesting tags based on file names, directory names, file extensions and even metadata for multimedia files.

It is furthermore possible to include and exclude drives from the program completely. The software program will display a wizard after installation that is walking the user through the first initial configuration. The user can pick drives, directories and files that he wants to tag right away. Tag 2 Find can also be integrated in Windows Explorer to add tags right away for selected files.

It would be impracticable if the application window would have to be opened to search the files and tags. The application is therefor offering a floating transparent search window that can be moved around on the computer desktop. Entering tags into that search form will open another transparent connected window that is displaying the results which include hits, partial hits and related tags. A click on a resulting tag will show all the file names that have been tagged with the word or phrase.

Tag 2 Find can monitor the computer system for new files. The folders that are monitored can be defined in the application. It is for instance monitoring the Windows Clipboard and will display files that are copied to it for a while waiting for user input.

Additional options that might be interesting for some users are access to a tag cloud, automatic category management for selected file types, color coding tabs, drag and drop support plus import and export options for tags. It is really surprising how stable and extensive this early version of the software program is.

The only downside is the rather large resource usage. The software program uses roughly 23 Megabytes of computer memory while displaying the floating tags search box and about 53 Megabytes of virtual memory. Tag 2 Find runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, an NTFS formatted file system (at least on the partitions that contain files that the user wants to tag and administrative privileges during installation.

A click on a preview thumbnail will open a preview window containing additional information like size, title or format of the selected image. Size buttons on the bottom will load the image in different sizes. These size buttons are automatically adjusted depending on the original size of the image. The same toolbar contains buttons to save the image to the local computer, view it in the original context (which will open the image in the default web browser), set it as the desktop background, copy or share it.

Ginipic is an excellent image search engine that can be used to search for images on multiple image search engines including some of the best places to download wallpapers like Deviant Art or Flickr. The application is a bit heavy on the resource usage but since it does not have to be running all the time in the background it does not matter that much.

But your GNOME desktop might not have beagle set up to work out of the box. You might have to take a few steps to get the beagle daemon running and indexing. This article will tell you just how to do so.

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have everything installed. Open up the Add/Remove Software application and do a search for “beagle”. You will want to install everything for the Beagle system as well as any of the backends for any applications you want Beagle to index (including Evolution, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.)

Once you have everything installed you will then need to start the Beagle Daemon. This can be done a couple of ways. The easiest way is to open up a terminal window and issue the command beagled. You can find out instantly if the daemon is running by issuing the command beagle-ping if you see something like Daemon version: 0.3.8 you are good to go.

If you want to make sure the daemon runs every time at login you can set this up with the beagle-settings tool. To open up the settings you can either issue the command beagle-settings or go go the System menu. click on Preferences, and then click the Search & Indexing entry.

Beagle Settings Window

Make sure you have the Start search & indexing automatically check box clicked. If you are using a laptop it would be wise to uncheck Index data while on battery power.

Once you have that configured, click OK and you are set.

Now if you go to the standard search you will not be using Beagle. On my installed GNOME 2.24 there was no icon or menu entry for the Beagle Search tool. I actually had to create one. The command you need to issue to open the Beagle Search tool is beagle-search. You can create an application launcher or desktop icon for this. The quickest is to add a launcher to your panel. Do this by right clicking the panel and selecting Add To Panel. Once the new window opens select Custom Application Launcher.

If you want to get the actual Beagle icon you will need to point the icon locater to /usr/share/beagle/webinterface/images/.

Launcher Settings

Upon first launch of the daemon, depending upon the power of your system, Beagle can take a while to index all of the files and data. Most likely you will not even notice any hit on the system from the daemon running. If you do you can always tweak the Beagle settings to better suit your needs.

Beagle Search Window

When you open up the Beagle Search window you can select where to search and then enter what to search for. As you can (in the image to the left) Beagle categorizes each hit on the search.

Final Thoughts

Comprehensive searching can be critical to efficient work on a computer. The Beagle search tool blows away the standard search and should be a must-have on every GNOME desktop you run.

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.

Windows Search is basically a desktop search application much like Google’s Desktop Search. It builds an index of the files – and other information like emails – on the system after installation which takes some time depending on the size of the hard disks and the amount of files stored on them. Some users reported indexing times of several hours in previous versions of Windows Search.

It does take this long because Windows Search does not only index file names and attributes but also file contents for selected files including most text formats like Word and HTML documents but also media files like images and video formats.

I still prefer Locate32 which is resource friendly and faster in my opinion.

The two parameters that you always have to select are a path and a search term that you want to find, every other parameter is optional. Search results begin to appear immediately while other files are still processed. The time it takes to process all files depends on the size of the hard drive(s), the cpu, ram, files on disk and several other factors. It is still fast enough and responsive so that it is possible to work with the search results even if the search is still going on.

Search queries are not only compared to filenames but also with file contents. This is extremely useful if you are looking for documents that contain a specific phrase. The line containing the phrase is shown in the search results together with the filename and path of the file.

Fileseek offers a few functions that allow users to refine their searches. Files and Filetypes can be included or excluded in the search. This feature supports wildcards and multiple entries.

Regular Expressions are supported in the search queries. This is a powerful advanced feature of Fileseek. Best of all though is the size of Fileseek. It’s tiny with only 186 Kilobyte unpacked.

Fileseek uses a different approach than my favorite search utility Locate32. Locate32 uses a database that has to be updated regularly. The benefit of this approach is a blazing fast search, much faster than that of Fileseek. If you do not search that often Fileseek might be the better alternative.