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Deep File Divers

We test six powerful desktop search utilities that scour the vast recesses of your PC to uncover long-lost file treasures.

Scott Dunn

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Copernic Desktop Search

When it comes to ease of use, this program wins hands down. It encourages you to search within its preset categories for the Internet (Web, Images, News, Shopping) or your computer (Emails, Files, Music, Pictures, and more). These categories make working with Copernic Desktop Search incredibly simple.

After the installation you'll see a search box in your taskbar. Type in your keywords and then press Enter to start looking within whichever category (desktop or Web) you last searched. Or use the box's pop-up Category Window to select a different category (see FIGURE 3).

Refining your search is a simple matter of clicking various options in the results window. The sort options are specific to the file types shown in the list: You can sort documents by Folder, Date, and File Type; music by Folder, Artist, Album, Genre, and Date; and so on.

Copernic is more than just a pretty interface, though. It indexes Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, and other e-mail formats without requiring that you hunt down and install a third-party plug-in.

The program's Preview pane shows a close visual approximation of the files returned. It switches to player controls when you select an audio file in the results window. Text previews have buttons for each keyword you searched for.

On both of our test systems Copernic found one MP3 file based on its metadata but couldn't locate another with the same metadata--even though it had the same keyword in its file name, too. Copernic also can't search compressed files. The program did much better at retrieving images; it was able to search embedded comments to find the JPEG image files stored in our test folder.

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