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.

Windows Desktop Search has unfortunately had a bit of a spotty record as of late. Those of you early adopters that have been running the Office 2007 beta have been subjected to the previous version which had the UI stripped out of it. This wasn't a problem for searching Outlook, but otherwise it was pretty neutered. Worse, the indexer ate up a ridiculous amount of resources, and performance was pretty spotty.

Finally Windows Desktop Search 3.0 Beta 2 has been released, and the GUI is back, along with improved performance and more modest resource usage. The indexer is happily grinding away on my workstation, and although it tries to stay out of your way by only indexing aggressively when you're not actively using your computer, you can set it to go ahead and index anyway, which I've done. So far I'm pleasantly surprised that doing this hasn't caused any sort of noticeable lag - of course it remains to be seen how it performs once the index is up to a more realistic size.

This is a must download for any of you that are currently limping along with Office 2007 and the previous hobbled version of Windows Desktop Search. For the rest of you that are actually using WDS rather than one of the better free alternatives like Google Desktop, Copernic Desktop Search, Yahoo! Desktop Search (there's no shortage in this category of software), you'll probably want to have a look at this version as well.

The newest version of of Copernic Desktop Search—2.0—is now in beta. The beta isn't feature-complete, but includes a ton of changes, including a redesigned UI, significant performance improvements, simultaneous searching in all categories, smart query corrections ("Did you mean..."), saved searches, wildcards, and a completely redesigned deskbar. You might recall that late last year Copernic was acquired by meta-search company Mamma.com, so it's nice to know that that hasn't impeded their development process. Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 Beta is free and you can download it here.

[Via Digg]

Copernic, best known for their powerful and free desktop search product, has been purchased by Mamma.com in a deal valued at approximately $22 million in cash and stocks. The deal brings together two companies that had originally announced intentions for a merger over 13 months ago, but had their plans waylaid by an inquiry by the Securities and Exchange Commission into Mamma.com's trading activities.

The two company’s products appear to mesh well together; Mamma.com provides a meta-search engine, aggregating the results of many search engines, while Copernic provides free and commercial search-related applications for user’s desktops. It remains to be seen whether Mamma.com will keep the Copernic branding, or rebrand the Copernic utilities.