Hard Disk Search Engine

In My Humble Opinion
1

So windows has a way of searching your hard-disk for documents containing a certain term or phrase, either in the title or in the text (if it is a word document for instance. This function will return a list of documents that meet the criteria, which is nice enough. I am wondering, however, if there is a search engine that would do the same but return results like google does, ie with a little blurb from a page that actually contains (part of) the search string. So I am looking for a program that does not just tell me ‘randomdocument.doc contains the text [randomsearchstring]’, but actually returns the sentence or paragraph in which that term shows up.

Does anyone know of such a program (preferably downloadable for free!)?

2

You might choose something from the following: Best Free Desktop Search Utility; Copernic is recommended and, looking at the screenshots, it seems it’ll do something similar to what you want.

I should note that I’m a linux user, so I have no experience with any of them and can’t make recommendations. I’d just use grep with the –context switch for this kind of thing. Maybe you should look into cygwin? (Just kidding…)

3

Google Desktop

4

I’ve used Agent Ransack on Windows for a number of years, and it has always worked well for me.