software that will index the contents of my hard drive...

January 22, 2007 2:19 PM

Is there a software that will index the contents of my hard drive and then allow an intelligent personalized search to take place whenever I search for stuff online , slanting online search results in line with the contents of my hard drive? The goal of this post is to find an online search engine (e.g. google) that can work seamlessly with a desktop search engine (e.g. x1) to come up with more intelligent personalized online search results.

When I say intelligent I mean the software can see the keywords in my hard drive contents and can deduce my interests and hobbies and patterns of past online searches and based on these keywords/patterns it can then slant online search results .

I got a feeling Google Desktop Search Engine {GDS} may be designed for this, since it shares the same browser as Google online search.

But I do not like to use GDS for a couple of other reasons. (One reason being its inability to index the contents of very large text files in my hard drive.)

By the way, I use google to do much of my online search. So a software that can work with google will be great.

But I will consider other software applications.

Thank you very much.

posted by cluelessguru to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

I'm pretty sure GDS is the way to go; I'm unaware of any others that are in the same vein. As far as I know, GDS does index large text files, doesn't it?
posted by craven_morhead at 2:43 PM on January 22, 2007

Have you tried Google Personalized Search? I have a feeling that something like that is the closest you're going to get.

I have a hard time even imagining what you're hoping for; Google Desktop indexes up to 10,000 words each of up to 100,000 files. Are you really asking for a search engine that takes into account more than 100,000 files with more than 10,000 words each to come up with precisely what you might be looking for when you type in, for example, the word 'fish?' I don't know if that would be a 'search engine' anymore. It seems like that would be a 'psychologist.'
posted by koeselitz at 2:47 PM on January 22, 2007

Response by poster: craven_morhead

I have tried GDS a few times .
I have a few text files over 1 MB and GDS only index the top half of the files. This is the biggest weakness of GDS.


koeselitz

I am using Google Personalized Search and this service does not index the contents of my hard drive. It only keeps track of my online search habits.


I need something that can do both , and feeding on each other seamlessly.
posted by cluelessguru at 2:52 PM on January 22, 2007

You could try saving your text files as .txt files to cut down on file size. Then, they should be able to index up to the full 10,000 words. Unless, of course, you have files larger than 10,000 words which you want to index.
posted by koeselitz at 3:04 PM on January 22, 2007

you might also look to see if there are file type plugins for GDS that overcome the limitations that are imposed by GDS.
posted by mmascolino at 3:12 PM on January 22, 2007

Response by poster: I like to keep some of my text files very big so that I don't have to deal with too many small files.

GDS is free but it is almost next to useless as far as I am concerned. A desktop search engine that cannot index everything inside a text file is not a desktop search engine, it is a joke.

And to be honest with you I don't think GDS works seamlessly with Google online search. I cannot find any literature that suggests their collaboration.
posted by cluelessguru at 3:15 PM on January 22, 2007

Response by poster: I looked around for plugins for GDS a year ago and I did not find any that could overcome the limitations of GDS.

May be something new has come up since then . I don't know.
posted by cluelessguru at 3:16 PM on January 22, 2007

Response by poster: koeselitz,

I am looking for a very intelligent online search engine that can , based on the contents residing in my hard drive, slant online search results that reflect more of my interests/hobbies.

For example, assuming the word "sex" does not appear in any of the text files in my hard drive, then the online search results will automatically downgrade any website that has to do with sex. And non sex related websites will have higher ranking in the online search results.

I hope this explains what I want.

Thank you very much everyone for your suggestions so far.
posted by cluelessguru at 3:24 PM on January 22, 2007

cluelessguru: "And to be honest with you I don't think GDS works seamlessly with Google online search. I cannot find any literature that suggests their collaboration."

In fact, I don't think any internet search program utilizes indexed hard-drive files to expedite internet searches. I've been looking all day for one that does, and I can't find a single mention of that kind of software.

As far as the documentation goes, it appears that Yahoo! Desktop indexes everything on the drive without the limits that GDS does. I have a feeling that Windows Desktop Search does too, although it sounds like the indexing process takes a while.

Here's a good list of desktop search engines.
posted by koeselitz at 4:11 PM on January 22, 2007

Response by poster: koeselitz

Thank you very much for your efforts.

Regarding desktop search engines I have tried about 10 of them , including Windows Desktop Search and Yahoo Desktop Search.

My favorites are:
Archivarius 3000 (not free)
Enfish (defunct)
Copernic Desktop Search (does not play well with my pc. It slows down my pcs. )
posted by cluelessguru at 4:39 PM on January 22, 2007