Copernic Desktop Search: Copernic's Search Technology Finds the Desktop Copernic's Search Technology Lands on the Desktop Joseph Moran
The amount of accumulated information on even the most well-worn PC can't begin to compare with the vast and seemingly endless repository of information we call the World Wide Web. But knowing that usually doesn't make the job of finding a particular file or scrap of information on your hard drive any less daunting or difficult.
To help with the task, myriad vendors have developed desktop search utilities that put Windows built-in tools to shame and that can make searching the bowels of your computer considerably more efficient and fruitful. No less a who's who list of Web search companies than Ask Jeeves, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have contributed utilities to the category.
Copernic, another company well-versed in the science of search, offers its own tool for the task that combines many of the best features of its competitors along with some unique and useful features of its own. Adding to its appeal is an excellent interface that manages to be user-friendly without being overly Spartan.
Copernic Desktop Search runs on any version of Windows from 98 up through XP. We reviewed version 1.5 (beta) of the utility, which like its predecessors is available as a free download at www.copernic.com.
Installation CDS is quick and easy, and upon completion the utility immediately sets about the task of indexing the hard drive contents. A nit to pick is that the utility offers no time frame for when initial indexing will be done — it doesn't even display the percentage of indexing completed. If you're willing to walk away from your computer for a long while after installation you won't mind, however.
CDS indexes data on the fly, but by default halts the process any time the computer is in use. On our test system (a 1.2 GHz Pentium M notebook with 640 MB of RAM), it took 94 minutes for CDS to distill a bit less than 10,000 documents into about 75 MB of indexing data containing over 172,000 keywords.
File Support
The types of files CDS can index are varied and extensive, making it one of the more versatile of the various desktop search tools currently available. Obvious candidates include Microsoft Office files such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents as well as both e-mail and contacts from Outlook and Outlook Express. HTML, XML, PDF, and even documents from most versions of WordPerfect (remember that app?) files can be indexed as well.
CDS can also index browser histories and favorites, and not just for Internet Explorer — Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape (v6 or later) are all searchable as well. Similarly, Microsoft's e-mail applications are not the only ones CDS will index. If you use the ever-more-popular Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client, CDS will let you search messages and contacts from that application, too. (Of note, Google recently added support for non-Microsoft browser and e-mail clients to its own tool as well.)
Support for image and multimedia formats is equally broad. Digital media formats indexed include iTunes, QuickTime, and Real Media files in addition to MP3, WMA, MPEG, and so on.
Unique to CDS (at least among the free desktop search tools) is the ability to search mapped network folders as well as local hard drives.
