Filed under: Business, Photo, Text, Utilities, Windows, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Freeware
X1 - Free Desktop Search
by Jason Clarke Oct 19th 2006
X1 has long been considered the Rolls-Royce of desktop search applications, but unfortunately was often left out of desktop search roundups due to the fact that it was a commercial product (and an expensive one at that), competing against a number of very good free offerings. Well it turns out that X1 realized they were losing out to all of the free offerings, and finally decided to release their product for free as well. You could actually get X1's technology for free for awhile now, under the guise of Yahoo's desktop search product. Yahoo's version is very unfortunately branded purple everywhere, and personally I had some system performance and stability issues while running it, which is not uncommon amongst desktop search indexing software. Unfortunately, the forum Yahoo provided for users to discuss issues and help one another was terribly inadequate - it lacked some basic features like message threading. I gave up on Yahoo's version at least 6 months ago.
I installed X1's latest version 3 days ago, and I have to say I'm impressed by both the speed at which it indexed my system, and how little impact it appears to have on my system's performance. I can't really comment on system stability yet, since those issues often don't show up immediately, but so far, so good.
X1 really shines when you actually have to use the interface to search for something. It opens quickly and is very responsive, searches as you type without slowing you down, and offers a number of graphical ways to adjust your query. While you can learn the syntax to search based on specific fields, for example all messages "to:jason", there's really no need since all of the most common fields are provided, and you can simply type your search term into a dedicated search box for the field you want to use. Sorting your results is a simple matter of clicking on the column heading that you would like to sort by. Compare this with the rudimentary results listing you get from Google Desktop. It certainly makes finding what you're looking for much faster, with less time spent trying to tweak your search query just so.
X1 also has a commercial version that will allow you to index folders on your network. I haven't had a chance to test this functionality, but I would like to in the near future.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Glorious said 1:03PM on 10-19-2006
Thanks for information!
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sports lover said 1:03PM on 10-19-2006
Good to know and I am off to download it now. I have been trying to unclutter my hard drive ha ha so this will help some.
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Brad said 1:03PM on 10-19-2006
I've tried all the desktop search clients, including google, copernic, microsoft, yahoo-x1, etc... I really liked copernic, but I found it to be very unstable, often freezing up. Even the new version (2.0, I think) froze a lot. Google is ok but you can't preview files nor can you limit searches to pdfs or .doc etc... (as far as I know). The new microsoft search is actually pretty good (I'd put it in second place), but I finally tried X1 when it became free and as far as I'm concerned, it blows the others away. It's super fast, super stable, it lets you preview documents (saving you the bother, in many cases, of opening them) and you can narrow searches easily.
In short, I liked it so much that I'm writing a comment on your blog (something I very rarely do!).
Download it and if you don't love it, I'll give you your money back!
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Matt said 4:48PM on 10-20-2006
Google desktop has revolutionized the way I use my computer. Largely because (1) CTRL 2x opens it the search, allowing it to be used quickly and (2) it also works with URL's. Does X1 provide either of those options? Otherwise, I'll probably stick to Google and save X1 for those hard to find files.
And to Brad, you can specify filetypes with Google - http://desktop.google.com/features.html#advancedsearch.
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Adam said 4:48PM on 10-20-2006
I've used X1 for years (paid the $100 for it) but over the last several builds I've found it slower and slower. It would regularly lock up for a few seconds as I tried to type in the search fields. When I got a list of possible files and would try to scroll down the list (with a wheel or just arrowing down) it would go very very very slowly. I loved the product and the interface but it can't handle 20 GB of email, files, and attachments like I've amassed in the past 4 years on my job. Understand this is on with a 3 GHz processor and 1 GB of RAM - not a super machine these days but no slouch either.
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hazard said 4:48PM on 10-20-2006
I found it rather underwhelming. Not my cup of tea visually either. But worst of all is the amount of times the firewall caught it trying dial out without permission - it even tried to contact home when being uninstalled!
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Judi Sohn said 10:14AM on 10-22-2006
I used X1 (paid) for years, but like the a previous commenter I found each build to be slower and slower. The interface is dated and often hard to read on a large monitor. I'm now using Copernic Desktop Search 2, and while it lacks some features that X1 has (such as searching .PST files that aren't open in Outlook) it's faster, has a nicer interface and has *much* less wear & tear on the drive while indexing or just running in the background.
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