- Quick specs
- Price: Free
- Operating system: Windows Me, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98
- Date added: December 13, 2004
- Total Downloads: 88,282
- Downloads last week: 479
- See full specifications
A newer version of Copernic Desktop Search is available.
(Download doesn't provide access to previous versions of this program.)
- CNET editors' rating: stars
- Average user rating: stars out of 133 votes
See all user reviews
CNET editors' review
Reviewed by: CNET Staff
Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo aren't the only ones bringing more search power to consumer desktops. Copernic's Desktop Search tool makes it fast and easy to find documents, e-mails, and other files on local drives. Like other desktop search tools, it creates a searchable index of all the data on a computer's drives, and updates it every time a file is added, removed, or modified.
A left-side search column allows simple keyword queries and more refined searches based on file size, date, file type, or folder. Easy-to-read icons at the top of the screen let you limit searches by category, such as stored HTML pages, e-mail, and videos. The program is lightning-quick, displaying results as fast as you can type.
We especially like the Copernic Deskbar, a search window that appears in the Windows Taskbar and makes quick queries very handy. However, we would like an image viewer, and we wish the application's PowerPoint viewer could display graphics. Copernic comes with optional search toolbars for Internet Explorer and Firefox.
Overall, Copernic offers an efficient way to search your PC, especially for multiple or large hard drives.
Publisher's description
From Copernic :Copernic Desktop Search brings a search engine right to your PC and allows you to instantly search files, e-mails, and e-mail attachments stored anywhere on your PC hard drive. The application executes subsecond searching of Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, Acrobat PDFs, all popular music, picture, and video formats, contacts, the browser history, and Favorites. It features a seamlessly integrated previewer that instantly provides you with a view of the file or e-mail you're looking for. The previewer highlights all search terms and automatically scrolls to the first use of these terms in a document, eliminating the frustration of having to sort through endless text to pinpoint specific words. This latest version provides a more refined search experience thanks to performance optimizations, new customization options, user-interface improvements, and bug fixes.
Version 1.2 adds indexing for Mozilla Firefox history and bookmarks, support for the latest PDF file format, and a redesigned user interface for Web searching. It also improves the handling of French, German, Spanish, and Italian content.
More popular Search Tools downloads
- 1,346 downloads 1. Google Desktop
- 1,125 downloads 2. WebFerret
- 1,113 downloads 3. Music MP3 Get
- 618 downloads 4. Ares Music
- 315 downloads 5. Cell Phone Number Trace
- See all Search Tools downloads
User reviews of Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
- Average user rating: 3.8 stars out of 133 votes
- My rating: 0 stars Write review
-
Showing 5 of 24 user reviewsSee all 24 user reviews
This software version | All versions -
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful
Version: Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
"search broad or narrow, and quick!"
Pros: installed flawlessly on XP. indexing took about 4 hours (for about 18Gb). you can search by file type, or search for all files. you can see a preview of hits, with your search words highlighted. results in 1 or 2 seconds. i tried this after testing Google's desktop search, which was a bust.
Cons: haven't found any yet.
-
Version: Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
Pros: Quick search, nice GUI, many options.
Cons: The Quick Preview is slow. It takes looog time to scroll to first keywords in the file and no easy way for scrolling to the next occurrence and no info about how many hit in each file.
-
Version: Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
"Works great, lightning fast results , doesn't slow my system & FREE!"
Pros: I'm not sure why some reviewers said it slowed their system and took forever to index. I am using beta version 1.5, though -I downloaded it directly from the Copernic website. Maybe, the more current version has fixed some of the bugs people are finding in version 1.2. Anyway, I have a 5 year old system from 2000, windows ME, 600mhz intel celeron, 256mb sdram & 80gb hard drive. The program stopped indexing when resources were low or I was actively using the system & started back up indexing when resources were high or I stopped actively using the system for 30 seconds. It did take several hours to complete the initial index, but updating the index only takes minutes. I haven't noticed any sluggishness to the system since I installed it. I tried Yahoo Desktop Search & liked it (it had a better viewer & previewed more software with graphics -like publisher), but the Yahoo Desktop Search kept crashing (so frequently it started driving me nuts). So I installed the Copernic Desktop Search, have been getting a lot of use out of it and haven't missed Yahoo Desktop Search at all. Even though I have files organized in folders, it's still hard sometimes to find documents even within an organized folder subsystem. With Copernic I just type in a keyword & find the document I'm looking for very quickly. If the results list is too long, I can narrow it easily using file type, file size, date options.
Cons: I wish it indexed more file types and had a better viewer/previewer (that showed graphics in documents instead of just text). I added Publisher extension because I do a lot of documents in Publisher but it only searches the file name not the text inside the document or the graphics. It has an integrated music player but I get an application error when I try to preview the music file.
-
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful
Version: Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
"Searching is good, indexing is not. Google is the right choice."
Pros: Searching is nice. Although on a standalone window, it is fast and results are clear. Also, searching as you type seems pretty fast and advanced. Indexes everything, and you can define which folders to index.
And it seems like the only search application supporting windows 98. (Not to mention the awful Hotbot)
Cons: Indexing takes forever. Period. I have a P4-2400 system, it has been 2 weeks, and still indexing my 1 year load of Outlook mails (About 500 Mb. of Outlook data) and a humble 5 Gb C: drive. It intervenes with your daily jobs, eats processor power; hard disk access, ram. Better set resume indexing options to high values like 1 min. Google D.S. is faster in searching and indexing. GDS had done the indexing right in about 1,5 hours.
When compared, Google Desktop Search seems way way ahead of Copernic. But Copernic is not bad at all. It takes a fine 6 grade from me.
-
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful
Version: Copernic Desktop Search 1.2
Pros: don't know any
Cons: I installed this software over 2 weeks ago, to this day it still did not indexed my 20 GB hard drive. My computer was on all the time, only turned off few minutes daily just to restart, so it's indexing total over 340 hours!
My pc has a Pentium 4 processor 3GHz, and 1 GB memory. So my pc is not slow, but the indexing is.
Before copernic I tried Google desktop search and it indexed my hard drive in 2 days only. Why copernic takes so long to index ? it's ridiculous.
- See all 24 user reviews Write review
Submit your review
Previous Versions:
