Find it fast: our top five desktop search apps

Updated September 23, 2005

There's a hot new battle emerging between Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft over finding specific files on your hard drive, a.k.a. localized search. If you're like most people, you stuff your hard drive with more digital photos and ripped music files every day. Maybe you toss them willy-nilly into your My Documents folder in Windows, or--if you're really organized--you slip them into My Music or My Photos. If you're in business, you probably also pack away documents and correspondence that, if lost, could cost you time and money to recover.

But while it's handy to keep all of your files on your PC's hard drive, it's not quite so simple to find a specific one in the jumble. Before you know it, your PC has turned into a black hole where all-important information goes to die. That's why, right now, a handful of companies are fighting to build the holy grail of desktop search: an app that will quickly, easily find your files no matter where you stashed them. Like search engines that scour the Internet and produce results in seconds, these new hard drive versions can instantly pull up references to files based on keywords, file types, or designated folders. For example, these apps can hunt down your vacation photos as long as they have something searchable, such as the words "summer 2005," somewhere in their name.

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