A while back I did a comparison of various Desktop Search Applications to find one that fit my (seemingly simple) needs: I wanted to find files, and searching the contents of certain filetypes would probably improve things.
After testing the free offerings I settled on Copernic. Copernic appeared to index all the features I needed, and the interface didn’t suck like Google’s Desktop Search.
However back to the present and Copernic is, afterall, fail.
Copernic Desktop Search
In the bloated and slow corner we have Copernic:
Index Size: 1,212,935 docs; 9,196,707 keywords;
Approx 5GiB (includes cache of some files)
Time to load Copernice at startup: 5-10 minutes;
Average search speed 5-20 secs;
The “always on” preview slows down even more and sometimes randomly crashes the search application.
Locate32
In the other corner we have the nimble and speedy Locate32.
Index size: 1,574,784 docs.
Approx 100MiB.
Average search speed: 0 to 5 secs.
Time to load at startup: 0 to 5 secs (barely noticable).
I found that although Locate32 doesn’t index the contents of popular filetypes (such as MP3, TXT, or other Documents), the advanced searching options (such as RegExp) and indexing of all paths is more than enough to find any file.
Now Copernic (and the other Desktop appliances) can also index local Mail, however given the performance of Copernic I think I need to find another option…