Desk Top Search Engines

Desk Top Search Engines

I have already written in some detail about desk top search engines so I will list the ones that are now available for your use at no charge. A desktop search engine enables its user to search all the files on his/her hard drive or to search the web from your desktop. There are now seven available to down load.

"Ask Jeeves"-http://sp.ask.com/docs/desktop/ "Auto Focus"-http://aduna.biz/products/autofocus/index.php "Copernic"-http://www.copernic.com/ "Google"-http://desktop.google.com/ "Hotbot"-http://www.hotbot.com/tools/desktop/ "MSN"-http://toolbar.msn.com/ "Yahoo"-http://desktop.yahoo.com/

All of the above desktop search engines crawl your local hard drive, consuming power from your CPU compiling complete indexes of hard drive files to enabling a comprehensive search at a later date. These indexes, are updated on a regular basis in the background, while you carry on with your routine work.

MSN and Hotbot work the best with a Windows interface and Internet explorer. If you love the web choose Google as it looks like a regular search engine and is easy to use.

Ask Jeeves, Yahoo!, and Copernic are good choices if you like to keep file searches separate from other activities. AutoFocus is for "geeks" and has a high learning curve. In fact I even had a hard time getting their web site to work.

In summary: the three best applications are Google, Copernic (I have the Copernic Personal agent, paid version, installed and use it all the time) and Auto focus. Their usefulness could be enhanced if they were able to remember the items most frequently searched thus finding the preferred items much faster on repeat applications. Auto focus can suggest key words to those being searched but is unable to "remember" which words I search for most often.

Google sends an identifier back to the main server and MSN toolbar has an unclear relationship to the MSN server.

MSN Toolbar Suite and AutoFocus poke around inside your e-mail system, which could easily result in them delving into an organization's e-mail server infrastructure. So if you are concerned about your privacy and personal information remaining on your computer Copernic is the best choice.