You can start opening documents until you find the right one. Or, you can use Microsoft Windows’ built-in search function. Or, you can use one of the new desktop search tools. Since opening a bunch of files can be slow, and Windows’ native search can be clumsy, desktop searchers are worth a look.

Why Desktop Searches?

Desktop searches let you comb through the files on your computer, looking not at just the name of the file but into the actual contents or text. They also typically search through e-mails, images and video, Internet favorites or bookmarks, and Web pages you’ve browsed. As more of our lives are digitally mastered onto our computers, it will become increasingly important to make searching these artifacts easier.

The search companies want a bit of our brain; it’s a marketing thing to them. The more they can plant themselves as a total search solution, the longer their lives. They’ve subsisted on providing Web searches, now they want to help us organize our computers. They have their eyes on the mountains of data beyond that lay untapped and unsearched.

Using a desktop search tool, our bumbling hero above could have entered “Big Insurance Company” to see letters written to the company, e-mails to other people in which he discusses the company, and a list of Web pages that he recently visited about the company.

The kicker is the speed with which these searches run. Searches literally happen in an instant because the search tools “index” the contents of your files in advance. The index holds and organizes the content of the files on your computer with references or pointers to the actual files. Rather than culling through your files each time you ask for a word, they refer back to the index for results. The index is updated as your files change. In this way, a full index -- which can take a very long time -- can be run once when you install the program. Then, changes are reflected in the index as the happen. A new file is indexed and added once it’s saved; references to deleted files are removed.

What’s Out There?

Google, MSN, Yahoo! and others all have versions of desktop search engines, They all do essentially the same thing. They search files in your “My Documents” or all locations on your computer.

At the time of this writing, MSN offers a “beta” or pre-released version of their desktop search tool as part of their MSN Toolbar Suite (http://desktop.msn.com). It is limited to searching Microsoft Office documents in your “My Documents”, as well as Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail. This is OK if all of the files you want to search are in your “My Documents” or you only use Microsoft’s e-mail reader.

Yahoo! offers a little more depth with a beta version of their Yahoo! Desktop Search (http://desktop.yahoo.com). Using this one is a little confusing, but it allows you to customize your searches, including searching a specific directory on your hard drive. It also adds the ability to search Acrobat files and most e-mail readers.

Google Desktop was the first major desktop search released (http://desktop.google.com) and lets you search from the familiar Google page. While it doesn’t allow you to choose the directories you want to search, it does simplify searching. It has added support for Acrobat files, as well as Netscape and Mozilla/Firefox browsers and e-mail readers.

I stumbled across Copernic Desktop Search (http://www.copernic.com) and was hooked. Copernic is a free desktop search tool that offers the best mix of ease-of-use and flexibility. It lets you specify which directories get included in all indexing and searches. The results of searches are displayed in sorted groups by the date of the document. In our opening example, the last mention of Big Insurance Company would be at the top of the list.

Three notes about desktop searches. First, these things take up a lot of RAM (random access memory), so they may slow older computers down. Second, they use a sizeable chunk of hard drive space for their index depending on how much information you have stored. Finally, because of these two issues, I’d stay away from installing more than one search tool. Happy searching.