April 27, 2004

Search-Boosters For Your PC

Finding the best search tool for your PC will save you a lot of time.

Business Week's Stephen Wildstrom writes sub-$500 desktop PC these days comes with a hard drive that has a capacity of at least 40 billion bytes -- room for the text of 13,000 copies of War and Peace. All that space means that anything you save, from Grandma's e-mail messages to a Web page for a quaint bed-and-breakfast, is likely to stay there forever. Good luck trying to find it.

While companies, led by Google, have turned Web search into a science, it remains painful to look for content stored on your own computer. Windows' built-in search will hunt through your disk -- slowly -- for a single word or phrase, but it doesn't search through saved e-mail messages. And the search function built into Microsoft Outlook (MSFT ) is even worse. It is extremely slow, and its poor design makes advanced features, such as limiting the search to a range of dates, almost unusable. (Searches on the Macintosh (AAPL ) are faster but not much better.) (full story)

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