A few years ago I plugged DtSearch.Com’s excellent indexing and searching program dtSearch Desktop. In the July 2003 issue of Wired Brian Lam picks dtSearch Desktop 6.11 as the best (if, still, expensive) program to index and then search data on your hard drive for Windows-based users. Lam illustrates just how good the program is,
This hard disk detective is the most powerful document search tool on the market. use the Stemming search if you want to crunch all grammatical variations. Need help with typos? A Fuzzy search may come in handy. The app is also capable of doing some amazing phonetic and thesaurus-based searches. When I looked up “mucus,” Desktop 6.11 picked out a document titled “booger.”
More importantly, to my mind, dtSearch is the only program I’ve ever found that a) I could actually afford and b) could handle all of the data I threw at it. I’ve tried pretty much every program like this out there (including Enfish wish Lam lists has his “Best Buy” at only $100, but which I’ve never had anything but trouble with) and this is the only one I’ve found that won’t choke when you start to throw 30 or 40 gigabytes of data at it. DtSearch is also nice in that when it returns a list of documents you can view the documents right there in its built-in browser without having to launch the app (and yes, I’ve seen this in other personal knowledgement software, but again it actually works seamlessly in dtSearch).
In fact, dtSearch is the third part of my three-prong personal knowledge management solution. Between dtSearch, Conversant, and hours of using and getting a better handle on Google, it usually takes me no more than few seconds to get my hands on exactly the information I need.
I’m in the process right now of pretty much ditching all of the paper in my life — literally every piece of paper at work and home is getting, scanned, PDF-ed and indexed (more on that project later). DTSearch runs rings around this data — type in a project I worked on last month and I’m looking instantly at all of the e-mails, memos, invoices, etc. associated with that project. Just a few keystrokes and I can drill down to my heart’s content.
The only drawback is still the price — $200 is still quite a lot of money, but it will pay for itself many times over if, like me, you have large amounts of data to manage and you always seem to need to find documents right now.
(Note: all of the above only applies to Windows.