A More Convenient Desktop Indexing

By: Alex Nosov


Are you in need to organize all kinds of information on your local computer? Chances are that sooner or later you'll discover that searching for a file or document becomes the fastest and most convenient way to locate it.

Two large companies, Google and Microsoft, released their desktop search products, Google Desktop and Windows Desktop Search correspondingly. The two products, while vastly different in implementation and usability, use the same idea: full-text indexes of all recognizable content and blazing-fast, almost real-time search among huge numbers of files. Both tools make it easy to find pictures, documents and other resources by their names, parts of text from them, or meta data such as the FROM: or SUBJ: fields for email messages.

And there lies the problem. The two engines have different syntaxes for running anything but very basic requests. Looking for something more complex than a file name or text string requires the knowledge of either system's internal search language, and even then it's not always possible to search for exactly what you want.

Halftone Search by TrieTech relieves you from these limitations. With this add-on, you can use either Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search to find almost any type of resources on your computer. No need to learn the language of either product, and no limitations as to what you can and cannot search for! With Halftone Search, you can even index and search files stored in compressed archives such as ZIP and RAR and containers such as MHT and CHM. You can execute full-text searches inside of archives, too.

Using Halftone Search for finding information on your computer is much more convenient than using either Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search in their bare form. Being more user-friendly than Windows Desktop Search, Halftone Search offers Google Desktop something they were missing from the beginning: a real desktop search tool instead of HTML-only interface. Windows Desktop Search can use the IFilter interface to choose which types of files to index.

Halftone Search outputs search results in a conveniently organized window and provides the ability to select exactly the types of results you'd like to see by choosing the columns. If you were looking for a picture, your search results can be presented in a form of thumbnails - not just a list of files.

More information on Halftone Search and a free evaluation download are available at http://www.trietech.com/gdstools.php

SUMMARY: With Halftone Search, you can use either Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search engine to find practically any kind of resources on your PC.

TrieTech (http://www.trietech.com) is a leading developer of award-winning software for desktop search and files cataloging.

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