Well. After having extensively tested X1, Copernic Desktop Search (previous post) and FileHAND as alternatives to Windows XP’s completely pathetic search functionality, I settled on Copernic’s offering as the best of the free tools. X1 is the best functionality-wise, but I can get 85% of the way there for free, so I can’t justify spending $75 USD for that last 15%. Plus, X1 had some sort of strange problem where it would lock my PST file when my computer booted, and I would be unable to open Outlook until I shut down X1. I’m sure I could troubleshoot the problem, but I figure if I’m paying for a product that has formidable free competition, it’d better be perfect out of the box.

Enter Google, the 300 lb gorilla of the search space.

I have yet to work with it extensively, but Google’s new Desktop Search utility is very compelling. Having your desktop search results appear alongside your regular web search results is so intuitive and comfortable that I suspect I will soon start wondering what it was like before this existed.

That being said, I have one beef with Google: their single-minded focus on Internet Explorer. Google’s new desktop search has the ability to search through your browser history, so that you can now search in Google for “that site I saw a few days ago” and have a much better chance at finding it. That is, as long as you use IE as your browser.

True, IE has the lion’s share of the market, but that market share is dropping, FAST. Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, Mozilla’s Firefox browser has become what IE should have become by now. And Internet users are figuring that out in droves. Firefox renders pages faster than IE, has less security issues, and once you’ve used tabbed browsing, you’ll never go back. IE is a dinosaur, and the days where anyone with a web presence could afford to only support one browser are gone.

Google, good show! Great product, now make it support full functionality with Firefox!

X1, Copernic, FileHAND, Microsoft search - nice to have known you. Good luck.