Digital Tools Searcher of Your Own Domain:

Google your own e-mail, calendar, contacts and documents--no Google required.
by Stephen Manes

More From Stephen Manes Google's newsmaking IPO proves that searching the Web remains hot. But an often more pressing need, performing a search of your hard drive's own electronic documents with Google-like speed, is just beginning to develop a buzz. Google's new Gmail Web service lets you harvest relevant nuggets from your e-mail mine, but it is still in trials and not yet available to the general public and can't hunt through attachments anyway. The company isn't confirming the mounting rumors about the existence of a Google-for-your-hard-drive.

Microsoft has touted desktop search for a very long time; it's just bad at it. As Bill Gates admitted in a February PC Magazine interview: "We actually have in the operating system this text indexer; nobody turns it on, because it just sits there and grinds the disk." The search functions in Microsoft applications like Outlook Express can be every bit as unsatisfying. But at a July meeting for financial analysts, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Yusuf Mehdi demonstrated an unreleased version of a new local PC file search by finding the words "Total Attendance" in "an Excel spreadsheet that is inside of an e-mail attachment that's in my e-mail store." Microsoft trumpeted this technology as innovative, but competitors' existing products can already do the same trick and more.

The best I've found is Enfish Find. Once installed, it takes a couple of hours to index your mail (including attachments), contacts, calendar and files in popular formats. After that you can type in "Uncle Joe" and see everything on your hard disk that contains the phrase. Part of the screen shows a list of relevant items; the rest lets you look at the documents themselves, precisely where the first reference appears. If too many items come up, you can narrow the results by adding words and/or restricting the search to specific types of documents or the dates they were created. Once you've found the right item, double-clicking will launch it in the proper application.

The $50 program installs optional toolbars in Microsoft Office programs and Internet Explorer, so a search is never far away. But I found a few glitches, such as calendar entries sorted by the day they were entered rather than the day they occur, and unexpected delays in updating indexes. Enfish does create a potential security and privacy risk by retrieving and displaying Web links in received e-mail--potentially revealing your existence to spammers--even if you've told your e-mail client not to. But if you're willing to put up with that and take a bit of time learning the program's syntax, you're likely to find Enfish Find exceptionally useful. Skip the $200 Professional version, which adds needless complexity.

A reasonable $100 alternative is X1 Technologies' X1 Search. Unlike Enfish, it can find "shopping" and "shops" when you type in "shop." But whereas Enfish searches everything at once, X1 makes you perform annoying separate searches for files, e-mail, attachments and contacts and doesn't handle calendar entries at all. X1 has the same downloaded-links bug that Enfish does, but adds some glitches in the way it works with Outlook Express, like the inability to forward attachments if you launch a message from X1. It also crashed now and then on my machine.

A third program, HotBot Desktop, installs itself as a toolbar for Internet Explorer. It's free at hotbot.com but is currently so ill-conceived that it won't bother to index any files unless you go to an unobvious place and tell it to--and a major bug kept it from working with e-mail at all on my machine. But you might get luckier. The company plans significant improvements in a future release. While waiting for Microsoft, and possibly Google, to get their entries into the market, you can sample X1 and Enfish in 15- and 30-day free trials. So it won't cost you a dime to see if you agree that Enfish is the real find.

Stephen Manes (steve@cranky.com), was cohost of Digital Duo and has been covering technology for two decades. Visit his homepage at www.forbes.com/manes.

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