More on desktop search

Note: partial results only. One-time indexing in progress. Indexing is only done when your computer is idle. Outlook email is only indexed when Outlook is open.

This message greeted me this morning. I excitedly opened up Google’s desktop search to test some searches. Having left my computer running all night, setting the power options to never shut it down, I expected Google’s desktop search to have completed indexing my notebook computer.

“Partial results” means it didn’t finish. Then I read the entire message and realized that I would have to leave Outlook open AND my notebook running in order to index everything. Oh well! I’ll try again tonight!

I’m still trying out Google’s desktop search, and comparing it with Copernic’s desktop search. I blogged about this yesterday. Copernic’s solution will index Outlook files even if Outlook is closed. This is nice, but is a security risk, I guess. Google must take a safer approach. If I reboot my notebook and do not open Outlook, Copernic will try to open Outlook mail files. This causes Outlook’s username/password login box to appear just like when I normally open Outlook (I’m on a network and my Outlook is set to synchronize with an Exchange server.)

Some differences I’ve noticed:

1. Copernic will index Outlook mail stores even when Outlook is not open. Google will only index Outlook mail stores while Outlook is open.

2. Both Copernic and Google will index all my Outlook mail stores. I have 3 — the normal Outlook offline mail store, a personal store, and an archive store. This is great! I like being able to search all my mail store files at once since the purpose of search is to not know where something is stored! However, Copernic tells me which mail store a message is found in. Google doesn’t seem to tell me where the message is stored. Maybe this doesn’t matter, since the message is found. But I like knowing where it found the message!

Time to quit typing and let Google continue indexing my stuff.