Searching your desktop

I’ve noticed recently that everyone is putting out a desktop search tool that you can download to help you find things on your computer, much like the “Search” tool for Windows. These tools can also find things in your emails and on the web as well.

Now, I’ve never tried one of these so I’m not sure how I feel about this. I’m not that excited because I’m okay with using the Windows “Search” tool, like I have for years. However, the one spot I’d use it most often is my email.

I’m an electronic pack-rat. I keep all my emails and email conversations, IMs, any pictures that I find on the internet that I like, etc. Because of this habit, my inbox has well over 500 emails in it, with 250-some ones I haven’t even read yet because of time! My only concern is how well one of these would work; if it’s even worth my time and hard drive space to download one.

There’s also sooooo many to choose from. It seems like every search engine has one; Google, AskJeeves, MSN, etc. Plus, other, non-search engine sites have them too!

Which one is the best, if there is even such a thing! Are they all just copies of each other with different looks? How different could they be in terms of their search capabilities? If I type in “blue balloon pic”, shouldn’t they all bring up the same results with all the “blue balloon” pictures on my computer and email? I guess the web search part would be different, naturally, but the hard drive and email searching should be quite similar.

Now I’m not about to go out and download any of them anytime soon, but this was just something I had noticed recently. And these are my thoughts.