Desktop Search Tools - My preference

So far I have tried Copernic, Google, MSN and Yahoo Desktop Search tools.

Here is a my short reveiw of the things that I uses desktop search for:

  • Some basic document searching
    All seem to do well at this.
  • Search Code Files (i.e. .h, .cpp, .cs etc)
    MSN searches code files, Copernic and Yahoo can be configured to search any file type, and Google doesn't search these types nor does it allow for configurations of file extensions.
  • Search For Files by Name
    Sometimes I just want to find files like notepad.exe for example. Yahoo indexes most files types by name, MSN and Google do not index file names, and Copernic can be configured to index other file types such as .exe.
  • Search Network drives
    I house a lot of files on my server and then map the drives on my local machine so I want to be able to search network drives as well. Copernic and MSN are the only ones that allow for indexing mapped network drives.

One other feature I would like is to have a hotkey to open up the search window. Right now most have a deskbar search that you can access via a hotkey but I don't really like those deskbar's taking up space on my taskbar. So what I have done is used Run++ to re-mapped WIN+F to launch Copernic, I do however have to manually set focus to the search textbox ;(.

Well as of right now I'm using only Copernic Desktop Search because it has most of the features I want (at least more than the others). Maybe once the others come out of beta they will be more complete with the features I want.

Update: Fixed the Search Network drives section thanks to a comment from Rich. MSN does allow for network drive indexing.

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