Copernic vs Yahoo! Desktop Search
Offering the possibility to index harddisks seems to be the next big thing in IT. Hardly a week passes by without someone introducing a new tool for this.
I haven’t checked them all out. Copernic desktop search does its jobs reasonably well, and has become a tool I could not miss anymore. The Google Desktop Beta didn’t offer not enough possibilities; it needs to be able to index .rtf and .pdf files to become any use for me. And Microsoft’s solution I simply don’t trust. Their software is always nothing more than mediocre.
Yahoo! seems to offer the first real competitor to Copernic. Mainly because it can index over 200 different file formats; among them MacWrite II-files. MacWrite II happens to be the word processor I used in the first part of the 1990s. It always looked to be too much mind numbing work to convert all the files from those years to something readable on a PC, so I only transferred the important ones into .rtf.
And, after having used it for about a week Yahoo! Desktop Search turns out to be about as good as Copernic. I do not notice a lot of difference in their speed or usability.
The one thing that could sell Yahoo!’s tool to me is the e-mail button. Let the program search for a particular file, select it, click that e-mail button, and the file is automatically attached to a new message in your e-mail client. Now, that is a neat and useful trick, because I often get requests to mail specific files.
However, Yahoo! Desktop Search uses an internal viewer that seems incapable of showing more than one page of a .pdf at the time. So scrolling through a document that way is unnecessarily complicated.
And that is the main reason I’ll stick with Copernic, for now.
[x]#1006 fan vrijdag 14 januari 2005 @ 18:52:30
