Tuesday, September 07, 2004
Copernic Desktop Search Followup

After working with both lookout and desktop search for a couple days, I uninstalled lookout.  Desktop search definitly suits me better, although it's still not perfect. 

My desktop search has my whole hd indexed, code and all (including a pretty big number of open source projects).  The entire database is around 80 megs, which isn't really bad when you consider how much code is actually indexed.  Searching through emails and code is very simple, and very fast.  I also much prefer the desktop search ui for displaying the results to lookout.  Lookout was great for email searching, this really fills in the rest of the gaps.

A few complaints still, though.  The indexing process took a very very long time.  It may be because it was pushed to a back thread a number of times, but it really took about 2 days of normal for the whole index to be updated.  Of course I could have let it sit overnight one night, but what kind of test would that be?

Also, the search app hogs is a bit slow sometimes, and can be a memory hog at times.  This would be expected, though, considering all the work its doing, so I can live with it.  The trade off is well worth it.  Also, outlook idles about 30 megs less after uninstalling lookout, so desktop search may actually take less persistant ram. 

So far, though, I am very happy with the desktop search.  I love searching through code cause yes, I am just that geeky.  Also what prompted this post was actually finding an email from months ago with a code snipplet I needed by the sender's last name, and the word “filter”, and it was the 5th email down.  Sweet.  (of course the time I saved in looking for the email, I used twice writing this post  :)