by The Open University
Available in 48 free installments
Owner:
Finding your paperwork or electronic files can be a problem. You may find that even if you do have some sort of filing system, your structure soon gets quite large with files in multiple locations, which can be hard to navigate. You may find yourself making arbitrary decisions about which folder to place a document in. It may make sense now but in the future, when you look where you think it should be, it?s not there.
At times like this you may resort to the search command from the Windows Start menu. If, like me, you have a PC with hundreds of thousands of files, you may find that search can take quite a while. This is because, unlike search engines, the basic search tool on Windows PCs does have to search through every file when a search is made.
Wouldn?t it be nice if there was a search engine for your desktop? Well, the good news is that there are several available, some of which are free for personal use. The majority of the free desktop search tools are provided by the big search engines ? in the hope that by providing a complete search experience you will use them for all your search needs.
For an overview of desktop search tools read the following article by Pandia
Download one of the following desktop search tools. You need to check your PC specifications first to make sure that you can run it on your machine.
Ask
Copernic
Google Desktop
Windows Live Toolbar
Yahoo! Desktop Search
When you have installed a tool do a search on your PC using the tool. Now do the same search using the Windows search command from the Start menu. Did you get the same results?
The first time you use a desktop search tool, it will need to build an index of the contents of your hard drive. This can take several hours, so you will have to be patient. Once the tool has built an index, any new documents you put on your computer will tend to be archived as they arrive, so the index will keep itself up to date without you noticing.
So why, you may ask, do I need to bother with organising my files when I can search for them? Using tools such as these means that you may not need to be quite so organised about how you organise your information. However, when you perform a search, there is an assumption that the term you are searching for appears in the document somewhere. But there may be occasions when you can?t decide what term to search for, or you may not know if it is in the document if you haven?t actually read the item. Additionally each search you perform does take some time, and you may have limited time available, so it makes sense to have some system of organising your files to complement such desktop search tools to maximise your chance of finding the information you need.
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence
