Been googling quite a bit and didn’t come up with any recent comparisons between the different desktop searches on offer. So, what do you guys use for desktop searching?
I’m looking for something that is not a resource hog and supports searches within Thunderbird.
copernic. thats the one i like 
well…windows search…thats work best…but google is very fast !
if you can compromise on free, try avafind. its damn fast
Back when I used google search it was far and away the worst piece of software I had ever used. In that one instant, I lost all respect for google (picassa is great, gtalk is OK, but google desktop search is crap). I did use copernic, and that was generally OK.
With Windows XP I use the default Inbuilt search, just disable caching and revert it back to classic search pane. Works for me instead of installing any additional softwares…
copernic is gr8 
+ the best part i like is that it indexes all ur files including songs/movies/clips etc instead of just docs like google does
try it, u ll like it…
Hmmmm…Stop thinking, Go for copernic…I have been using this since 2004,all versions from 1.51 to 2.2 current, tried lots of others in commercial ..some were even 50US$+,but no DS software could surpass this. I dunno whether it works with thunderbird.Money can’t buy everything!!!
Answer: Windows. What’s the problem with it in the first place? XP search requires way less resources than piece-of-crap apps like Google Desktop which will improve searching by 0.2 seconds 
And if you like your files and data to be indexed always for quicker searches, switch to Vista and turn on indexing.
On another note, organize your data/files and you will rarely have to use any desktop search 
I agree with some of the sentiments expressed above. In Vista’s search, you can find pretty much anything in an instant if it is indexed. The only requirement for something being indexed is it is in your \users folder (presuming you haven’t changed the default locations of the virtual folder). You can add locations to the index. It is blazingly fast, it can search inside outlook messages (you can have it index thunderbird archives as well, but it wouldn’t be able to understand them I’d suppose and so it might not be able to open them as individual emails, unless each email is a separate file). One big drawback is the lack of a preview pane. That would have made it completely awesome.
There is nDroid (formerly 320mph)
Welcome to CodeNite :: Home of nDroid
OpenSource and you can customize it if you know AHK…
Find it better performing than anything else, especially bcoz it does not run a caching service, just monitors the drive structure and indices along with a frequently used database.
Avafind is one of the best & lighest desktop search, that I’ve ever encountered.
Windows search for the win. Haven’t use any other search tool since i started using windows. I really don’t understand why people would want bloated software that keeps indexing files, when you can organize them neatly as Rio pointed out.
I have shied away from these desktop search apps due to the amount of time they put into indexing the stuff on my HDD & quite frankly I don’t have that much time or patience.
So Windows default search does the job pretty good.Any other suggestions are welcome.
vista’s default search
I guess most people are not familiar with copernic desktop search.Once they use it, they would definitely tell Bill Gates How the desktop search should be?
Windows search doesn’t search within my e-mails and metadata. And organizing data/ files sounds ok, but is not very practical when you have almost a terrabyte of storage like I have . Not to mentioned the mapped network drives ( another 600 GB+) on my home network.
Switching to Vista is an expensive proposition considering I don’t want my present setup to become sluggish. And I find it funny :S that you find free desktop searches meaningless and yet suggest upgrading to a very expensive Vista upgrade (hardware+software) just for the indexing! Though I will eventually shift to Vista (DX10😄 ), I’m guessing it won’t be in the near future.
Thanks everyone for your suggestions. I’ll try out Copernic and ndroid. Will bump up this thread later to post my experience.
P.S. Don’t anyone ask what I store on all that storage😄 !
Launchy 2 , looks sleek and you can choose the folders and partitions you want to index.
http://www.techenclave.com/applications/launchy-2-0-a-103098.html
using this since a long time.
It’s a search engine + application launcher.
well i had tried google desktop search a year back. totally bloated s/w which convinced me to stick to win search. however after seeing this thread, i installed copernic and it looks like good piece of s/w.