I've had several goes at Enfish which looks like a really good indexer but doesn't support my email client, Eudora, and has been pretty clunky the times I have tried and abandoned it, so I'm a sucker for something that will do the job properly, Windows 2000 index being, charitably, a crock. Dave says;X1 is the best desktop search engine I've found for Windows.
It indexes your email, your contacts, and all the files on your desktop. Want to find that email talks about phlogiston? By the time you've finished typing in "phl," X1 will have found it. I use it maybe 5 times a day.
Now X1 is starting to market itself. Good. It's worth the $100 in time savings alone. It's held up well as my email archive has grown to 110,000 messages. And the company has been very responsive to bug reports and enhancement requests. So, go X1! I hope you make a bundle.
I like the idea, especially getting rid of directory trees and the absurdity of assuming that the contents of one document will only, and always, relate to one small group of other documents and their contents. Its NOT how the human mind works, expecting us to adapt it to fit a filing system metaphor is nuts. Its also one of the things I like most about the way Awasu works.
So I am trying X1; some comments.
It finished indexing my hard drive, which is better than Win2K ever did. And it sure finds stuff fast and highlights it nicely and I'll see how it goes as I put a couple of papers together over the next few days, but I've noticed a few things already.
- It indexed my email trash bin, despite saying that it wouldn't. Update. It was a bug and X1 have fixed it.
- It doesn't appear to have something that strongly attracted me to Enfish and that is the ability to create and save filters so that, as you add new files, the filters you most often use are simply updated.
- It forces me to check email, files and attachments separately and doesn't carry the search term automatically to the next file type. Since Eudora lets me place my attachments folder in my documents folder that's redundant, but the fact is I may not remember where the information is, or even know that it is there. How many unread listserv emails do you have on your system? Exactly. I really don't care where the information is, I want it for itself, distinguishing between sources at the top level doesn't make sense, replacing the information tree with an application tree.
- It doesn't tell me how many files it has found. Update. Found the number, v small, bottom left corner. Needs to be more prominent.
- OK, this is probably unfair because its not Google, but it doesn't index web pages and the ones I look at are, at least temporarily, on my machine. A good 60% of my information comes in HTML, either as websites or in blogs, I want them parsed and possibly cached, especially ones like NYTimes that expire.
- It does, however, check Awasu but, like the aggregator
- Its search is very simplistic. It allows me to find files that have, say, Sally but not Fred, excluding all files that have both or neither, but the inverse doesn't seem to apply. I'm looking for all files that contain both Governance and IT or Information Technology, X1 gives me any file that contains any of those words, about 80% of them. Hmmm.
Now to the features demands, most of them hallucinatory at this stage.
I want to be able to set horizons so that the index returns me stuff from a particular few days, maybe either side of a date, or from a person, and anyone that is linked to that person, say, by being CC'd in an email.
I definitely want web pages indexed but also to be able to tell the indexer to drill down one, or two, or however many levels beyond the one I actually read, and maybe the top 2 levels of any page on another domain that the first page links to. Why not, lets throw in a reverse lookup as well.
Last but not least, I don't want to have it always open the native application. I want to be able to drag and drop selected text from the preview pane (which works fine in X1) into an XML "assembler" file, one that, once I've asembled the information from whatever source, I can then open in the appropriate application.
If I want to create a printable document, it opens in a word processor, if I want a presentation it uses Powerpoint, if I'm just collecting information to send to a friend, I can open it in an email or just leave it as an RSS feed for anyone with access to the server.
Oh, and yes, when I drag and drop each piece of information to the Assembler it has attached the name, date, title and author of the document from which it came, which automatically become footnotes. Hey, I'm not a total metadata luddite, just a picky one.
Simple, enough I'd have thought.
:-)
BTW Dave, my granny used to have something called anti-phlogistic cream for burns and rashes. I have no idea what it did, I bet neither did the manufacturers.
Comments