Trying to make room for my ever growing google index, I wondered when the growing would end.
According to this
Google Desktop Help Center question, Google needs a 1GB minimum and will keep going till it reaches 4GB.
Currently my index is at 2.2GB and its time to evaluate whether or not I want to free up the extra room. The sidebar (and all the config I’ve done on it to date) along with GDS’ plugin nature is difficult to part with. Do I just make the extra room or try something else?
I’ve used MSN Desktop Search and its support for filetypes was impressive (one note and visual studio out of the box). The customiseable search bar commands were useful too. I believe I uninstalled due to speed concerns – a tiny bit more resource hungry & loading up IE each time to bring up the results took a bit longer than loading Firefox to do the same in Google Desktop Search.
So I see my options as follows
- Drop my web-history and everything collected to date (only a measely 330,000 which for 2GB of storage isn’t really too hot), uninstall Google Desktop and find something else.
- Make the extra room for GDS, suffer without being able to keep some more mp3’s on the laptop and other static files locally.
That something else will have its own clinks and issues. A quick summary of the options is here
Copernic Desktop Search – claims to be faster, lighter on the hard drive and less resource hungry. It probably benefits from the experience and length the product has been around for. I’m not too sure about file support for one note, but it does support plugins, a ‘while on batteries’ mode and you can elect to have non-standard files indexed simply as text.
Blinkx I know for their video search, but I also found they do a desktop search. This I would expect would have some good stuff for indexing multimedia ahead of text documents which a quick look at their website reveals is true. They seem to offer not much flexibility in file types – you can have any colour as long as its black type thing.
Copernic seems to get the best reviews and is looking the goods. I’ve just updated to the latest version of GDS (did that the last time I was considering giving them the flick) so I will rebuild the index and if things still get bloated, then I’ll know where to turn.
Other paid products exist: X1, dtSearch (with Linux support) but for what I’ve seen, I think the free versions do give these guys a good enough run for their money.
I tried Google and Yahoo’s offerings a number of times–given them a “fair chance”, so to speak–but Copernic Desktop Search is *far* superior in its interface, ease-of-use, and speed.