The Hindu : National : Now, a search engine that scans your desktop!

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Sep 03, 2004

National

National

Now, a search engine that scans your desktop!

By Anand Parthasarathy

BANGALORE, SEPT. 2. Search engines such as Google and Yahoo, which burrow through the World Wide Web looking for the information you seek, have been likened to ships soaring into the `outer space' of Cyberia. Now you can delve deep into the `inner space' — the hard disk of your own personal computer — and find all the files, pictures, film clips and e-mails that you had carefully saved, but could never seem to find, when you needed them most.

Copernic Technologies, a small, privately-held software company based in Boston (U.S.), has offered for free download, a product that will seem like an answer to their prayers for most PC lay users, who worldwide, tend to save old correspondence, copies of files created or just anything interesting they saw on the Web. The problem is, they tend to accumulate on the hard disk over the years and become increasingly difficult to find when the need finally arises.

The Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) may change all that. The small piece of software — about 2.3 MB in size — can be downloaded from the company's website www.copernic.com where it is prominently displayed. On a normal dial-up Internet connection, this correspondent could download and install it in less than five minutes. It creates an icon on the Windows toolbar and clicking it, opens a pop-up page, which guides you intuitively through a search which can be narrowed to Outlook e-mails, pictures, video clips, music tracks and all common types of files from text to Powerpoint presentations, web pages to spreadsheets. Within seconds of installing the software, it scans the entire hard disk and indexes all the stored content. Searches can be done using key words or phrases in the file name or even in the body of the document. Compared to the "search" tool that comes with the Windows system, Copernic is awesomely fast. It also allows the user to have a quick look at every document thrown up by the search, before deciding if that's what one was looking for. As of now there are no annoying advertisements, but analysts are wondering how companies creating such free products will make their money.

The CDS system works with all popular versions of Windows from '95 to XP — a canny move, since Microsoft announced a few weeks ago that it planned to unveil a similar tool in the coming months. Google too is known to be working on a searchable email product because for many users, the information on their own private desktops is often as important (and unattainable) as the millions of pages out there on the public Web.

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