I Know It's In Here Somewhere

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By Jonathan Plutchok

Welcome back to my Tool Bar & Grill, where twice a month I report on useful Windows utilities or Web sites.

Bulletin: Synch Your Clock

Did you remember to set your clocks back on the night of September 30/October 1? Nut cases like me insist on near-perfect accuracy in timekeping, and fortunately these days it's a snap to do. The Internet offers many free utilities that synchronize your computer's clock with government and university atomic time servers world-wide. I've tried several, and most of them are easy to use. For example, Atomic TimeSync from www.analogx.com is about as simple as you can get, and Rocket Time from www.rocketsoftware.com also is very straighforward, while Dimension 4 from www.thinkman.com is a bit more versatile but with a more complicated interface. (Note: None of the clock-synch utilities I tried works through a proxy server.)

Kill the Puppy

Search tools have become routine fixtures on Windows desktops since Google made a big splash nearly two years ago through its expert PR campaign for its free Google Desktop Search utility. Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL rushed to release their own free desktop search tools. Meanwhile, Copernic Desktop Search has been quietly indexing my files for nearly four years.

Before other desktop search utilities became popular, the glacial Windows search tool, with its annoying bloodhound, was the main choice. Now you can forget about the pup, because searching your computer for any evasive bit of information has become fast and flexible. All the desktop search tools index everything on all your drives one time, and then maintain the index in the background during the computer’s idle moments.

Google Desktop Search is the most popular such tool, but Copernic Desktop Search is still my favorite. If you haven’t heard of Copernic, blame the publisher’s reticence in the PR arena, not the product. A number of reviewers have chosen the venerable Copernic over its newer rivals.

Now Copernic has just issued its brand-new version 2. I've been playing with it, and I am very impressed. Its superior features include:

  • Search by type of document (email, file, music, picture, etc.), or search all types at once. Either way, the number of hits of each type is shown.

  • The search results list is grouped, and search terms in the result titles are highlighted in different colors.

  • You can sort the search results on various keys, depending on the document type.

  • A preview window highlights the first occurrence of a search term in context in the selected result document. You can jump to additional occurrences in the preview window.

  • Email attachments are searched as well as the emails, including sent and deleted items folders.

  • You can search browser favorites and history.

  • You can search metadata of Microsoft Office, Open Office, Word Perfect, graphics, music, program code, and many other types of files. You can also add new file types to index.

  • You can search networked drives.

  • You can refine your search with wild cards and with Boolean search operators, including OR, NOT, and NEAR.

  • You can save searches for future re-use.

  • Searching begins as you type ("incremental search"), so results are displayed quickly, and narrowed as you continue to type.

  • Copernic suggests completions for your query as you type, and also offers query correction (“did you mean…?”).

  • The GUI is clear and highly configurable. Indexing rules are customizable, too.

  • There is no need for a browser or Inte rnet connection, though you can search the Web through Copernic if you want. Copernic does not collect any data if you do search the Web. (Google sends “anonymous” data to the mother ship, raising security concerns.)

  • An optional task bar search box provides instant results in a pop-up window.

  • An optional browser tool bar searches the Internet with multiple search engines (including Google, Yahoo, Ask, and others), returning more comprehensive results than Google alone.

Copernic is not without its shortcomings, of course, but it has fewer than most rivals. For instance, it indexes compressed files by their names only, not their contents, and it indexes PowerPoint text but not graphics. And it does not have a large developer community developing creative new plug-ins, as Google has (for example, a third-party Google plug-in indexes ZIP file contents).

Nevertheless, I am very satisfied with Copernic Desktop Search’s functionality and design, and I highly recommend trying out version 2 for yourself at www.copernic.com.

If all you want to search is Outlook emails, you could consider Lookout, a free Outlook plug-in from Microsoft (look for it at www.microsoft.com/downloads ). But I don’t like its geeky interface, it lacks a preview pane, and Copernic 2 is more flexible for searching emails, so I'm sticking with Copernic.

However, another powerful rival just arose. Reviewers have regarded the X1 desktop search engine highly for a number of years, and it would have been the editors’ choice more often if it didn’t cost about $75. It’s also the basis for Yahoo’s desktop search offering. Recently, the publisher relented to competition and now offers the X1 Enterprise Client desktop search tool absolutely free. I’ve downloaded a copy (www.x1.com), and I’ll report on it in a future column. For now, though, Copernic 2 remains my desktop search tool of choice.

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