Desktop search is one of those handy features I find hard to live without. I have some many documents, files, and other data buried in hundreds of folders, that I need an easy way to filter it all to recall exactly what I'm looking for. Rather than needing to remember the exact name of a Word document I wrote last year, I can do a quick search and recover exactly what I need fairly quickly with surprising accuracy. This is a category with a few usual suspects and the dependability of built-in Windows features.
Editor's Choice: Copernic Desktop Search received 14% of reader votes and is my favorite desktop search client. It searches Outlook emails and most data on my hard drive. While the free version lacks features of displaying search data as you type I find that an acceptable compromise and prefer the app's standalone search feature set to rest of the stuff that comes with Google Desktop.
3) Windows Live Desktop Search received 7% of reader votes and it's another favorite of mine. This is the search Microsoft should have built into Windows, but I think there must be antitrust issues keeping it out. Like everything else in this category it does an excellent job of locating stuff on your hard drive, whether that stuff is in email or stashed in a folder somewhere.
4) Windows built-in search received 4% of reader votes and likely could be coupled with the 5% of readers who said they don't use a desktop search, since everyone searches their hard drive at some point. The thing I don't like about Windows built-in search is the inability to find data based on what's inside documents and files. If Windows baked this stuff into the operating system we'd never need a third-party tool, but as it stands, I'd be lost without being able to quickly reference data and bypass the simple file search performed in Windows Explorer. Still I appreciate there are many people with far less data to tote around who may not need an extra solution for locating things.
33 additional apps were included in the survey, each receiving at least one reader vote.
