The index is automatically compressed by the file search software which does not noticeably affect the speed of the program.

Several filters are provided in the program’s interface. It is possible to search by name, file extension, time period, file contents or file sizes.

The program can maintain multiple indexes which can be searched together or individually. All results are displayed in the same interface with their name, folder, file extension, size, data and database the entry was found.

Selected files are automatically shown in the preview area. Not all files can be previewed but it works fine for images and plain text documents but not other formats like Microsoft Word or Excel files.

Several controls are available at the bottom of the search interface that can be used to open files, add them to the clipboard, copy, move or delete files and to export the selected files to a csv file.

One interesting option is the import of search databases which offers another interesting application: Searching the databases that have been created on other computer systems. All that needs to be done to do that is to create the index on another computer system and import that index of the files in the program. This is even easier than it sounds because of the portability of the file search application.

The search is not as fast as that of other Windows file search tools like Everything but the additional options might make the program interesting for users who prefer the features provided by Index Your Files.

Index Your Files can be downloaded from the developer’s website. A language pack for additional languages such as German or Spanish is provided by the software developer as well.

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.

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.

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.