Is there a nice frontend to Lucene to search anything on your PC?

July 19, 2004 7:11 PM

Joel just blogged about Microsoft's recent acquisition of Lookout (a search plug-in for Outlook) and in the comments it turns out that Lookout used a .NET port of the Lucene open-source engine. So, inevitably the question arises; is there any nice front-end to the same engine that can search anything on your PC? (Lookout actually can, but it is unmaintained now). This comes close, but not quite...

Re: DocSearcher: the "not quite" barb goes to that after downloading it, and read thru their entire site, I still haven't been able to set it up... there has to be something simpler than this.

posted by costas to computers & internet (2 comments total)

There's a java app called Luke that might do what you need. From the home page:

Luke is a handy development and diagnostic tool, which accesses already existing Lucene indexes and allows you to display and modify their contents in several ways...

I don't know whether Luke will actually create the indexes or if you'll need to do that separately.

I'd also like to say that this is my first metafilter post.
Evar.
posted by bachelor#3 at 6:59 AM on July 20, 2004

Daniel Gelernter (the Yale CS prof who was badly injured by the Unabomber) used to have a product called "ScopeWare" that tried to index all sorts of content, but while I can find a recent review of it, the site itself doesn't seem to be responding, so I don't know if it's defunct or not. It was supposed interface with Outlook, as I recall.

Mitch Kapor was heading up an open-source PIM project called "Chandler", but I haven't heard anything about that in a while, either, and that was supposed to be more of an Outlook replacement than a supplement. NEO (formerly "Nelson") is a search tool that only indexes Outlook content, so that's probably not what you're looking for either.

Finally, there's always Enfish. It's a commercial product, but it's been around for a while.

_{[Disclaimer: I don't have any affiliation with any of these products, and while I'm clearly interested in these products, I've not yet found one that was so good that I ended up using it regularly.]}
posted by LairBob at 7:40 AM on July 20, 2004