Isn’t it frustrating when you know you have something on your computer, but you can’t find it? Microsoft wanted to solve this problem with WinFS, but a few other companies have been working on it, and have created some very functional solutions in the mean time. Since WinFS is still at least 2 years away, this is a very good thing.

When LookOut first came out, I was a huge fan of it, and encouraged everyone I know that uses Outlook to use it. It’s a simple and elegant solution, and it’s sort of surprising that this kind of functionality isn’t already built into Outlook. But the more I used it, the more I could see why it’s not built in. LookOut makes Outlook slower. I didn’t notice it much at first, but LookOut runs as a plugin right inside Outlook, and therefore works through the Outlook.exe process. I started to have troubles when shutting down Outlook, and became frustrated with the overall lag I was experiencing with LookOut installed.

My other complaint is that although LookOut can also index any folder on your computer, it’s really not intuitive to go looking in Outlook for a file that is somewhere on your file system. It also doesn’t have any particular ability to handle special file types, such as music or image files. And XP’s default file searching capability is both anemic and broken.

About two weeks ago, I learned about Copernic’s new Desktop Search product, a free program that puts a search bar right on your taskbar, much like the Google Deskbar. (That feature can be disabled without losing any functionality, if you prefer).

Copernic’s Desktop Search gives me all the functionality of LookOut, but with a smarter indexing engine, better handling of different file types including email, files, music, pictures, video, contacts, favourites and history (if you use IE… blech!), and of course web searching, and does it all with a much more user-friendly interface than LookOut provides.

For a free product, you couldn’t ask for more than what Copernic is offering. If I have one nitpick, it would be that I would like the option being able to perform a Google search through the web search functionality in Desktop Search. Copernic offers AllTheWeb as it’s web searching option, which is okay, but not my first choice.

I heartily recommend that anyone looking for a much easier way to find files on their system download Copernic’s Desktop Search.