Apr 06, 2006

Copernic Desktop Search beats MSN

I used the MSN Desktop Search for several months on my work machine. I've found that a desktop search app is an invaluable resource in this day and age of gigabytes of data. I can't live without search now.

MSN Desktop Search has a lot of great features, but also several annoyances. For me, I found that it seemed to run somewhat aggressively in the background with several processes, and I couldn't stand that it wouldn't remember its window position from a previous search. The UI a little clumsy all around, and the preview window is quite slow. All in all, it is a very nice app, but not nearly as elegant as Copernic Desktop Search.

Copernic is known for their nice search engine aggregator, but blog posts from Microserfs Omar and Steve turned me on to Copernic's awesome desktop search app.

Copernic Desktop Search is what a Windows app should be. Compact, single process, unobtrusive, and highly useful. The search results from Copernic are as fast and accurate as MSN, but they are much easier to digest with a clean presentation and UI. The auto-preview window is also fast and accurate. And as a nice touch, I can run it on my laptop as it has a setting to pause indexing when running on battery power.

Did mention that Copernic is free?