Simple to use, but not too powerful, does not support e-mail search or Web
history, has limited filtering and sorting, and no preview pane. An advantage
is its word accuracy, which includes a dictionary that can identify and relate
words based on similar roots, for example, “innovation” and “innovate”,
something most desktop search tools do not have. Unlike other search tools that
shows all search results regardless of the number that can be overwhelming, for
example a list of thousands of documents with the keyword, diskMETA is more
intuitive, displaying only the most relevant, and is therefore easier to use.
diskMETA-lite is 1.8MB and can be downloaded free from www.diskmeta.com but the
diskMETA Personal and Professional versions are not free but comes in a
free 30-day trial version. All products work with Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP,
and 2003.
dtSearch Desktop 6.5
dtSearch Desktop is outstanding in terms of word accuracy features but has
low user-friendly features. There is no search keyword field on the main
window, so users have to go through the menu. The software is fast in searching
large amounts of text across a desktop, network, Internet or Intranet site and
supports a wide array of document types. If developers improve its graphic user
interface to make it less tedious to set-up, dtSearch can be a more interesting
user-friendly desktop search engine. dtSearch is more useful for corporations
and does not come free, although there is a 30-day free trial version
that can be downloaded from the company’s website (www.dtsearch.com). Works
with Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, and .NET. dtSearch requires IIS
(Internet Information Server). A Linux version is also available.