Is there a desktop search tool that doesn't require administrative rights to install and run?

October 19, 2006 11:02 PM

What tool can you use to perform full-text searches across PDF files that doesn't require administrative rights?

I often use a desktop search tool (Copernic) at my home PC for blazing fast searches across my files. I handle lots of PDF files at my office, and would like to use a similar tool to perform searches through them, however, all desktop search tools I know (Google Desktop, Copernic, Yahoo's) require administrative rights to be able to install them, and I don't have that. Is there any tool for a Windows PC that would perform searches across PDF files easily? I don't need it to monitor all my system, since all the files I would need to search across are in a single folder. If it can search through email and other files it would be a nice plus, but just PDFs would make my day. Does anybody know of such a tool?

posted by irian to computers & internet (6 comments total)

X1 is now free.. but looking at the KB is also needs admin privs..

Ask.com Desktop Search doesn't mention anything about needing to be an admin, and doesn't seem to mess with the TCP/IP stack (ala google), so it might not need admin.

http://about.ask.com/en/docs/desktop/overview.shtml

Good Luck,
Matt
posted by mattdini at 12:56 AM on October 20, 2006

I'm pretty sure that Adobe Acrobat (the full product, not Acrobat Reader) can create a catalog index of PDF files, allowing you to search across a number of documents at once. I'm not sure if Acrobat requires administrator privileges to install though, and of course it's not free.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:57 AM on October 20, 2006

Are you just looking for keywords in those PDFs or is there something else you need to be able to do that the search function in file explorer can't do?
posted by d-no at 1:05 AM on October 20, 2006

Ask Desktop Search does require administrative rights :(

I wouldn't mind paying for software as long as I know it would work.

Acrobat, as it includes a feature of printing to PDFs, most likely requires administrative rights to install. I'm going to try to install a demo to verify whether this would work.

d-no, I'm looking for finding specific information and figuring out which documents is it located. Like trying to find out of all documents that contain "multihop routing" within the text, not just the title. The file search from explorer won't look inside PDF files, it only gives me results from txt or office files.
posted by irian at 9:24 AM on October 20, 2006

Acrobat reader searches the file that's loaded. That function is undoubtedly available from the Run command line.

One of the keyboard macro utilities will be able to run a recursive search through .pdf files and output the results to a file. Kludgy, but it should work.
posted by KRS at 10:41 AM on October 20, 2006

I found the perfect utility for this, finally! :)

DocSearcher
http://docsearcher.henschelsoft.de/

It's an open source, free utility that is capable of searching across pdf, html, word, excel, rtf, open office and text documents. Indexing can be called on demand and for only specific folders, so it doesn't require any admin rights to run. It's a Java application, so it's a bit resource hungry, but it's perfect for my needs.
posted by irian at 1:24 PM on November 15, 2006