Fast, free desktop search

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 >> Windows' built-in search is okay, but here's a Quick Tip for finding e-mail documents and other files fast, smooth and free. Jessica Dolcourt from Download.com passed along two free apps that index your hard drive and provide search bars right on your desktop that you can use to quickly find what you're looking for. First, head to desktop.google.com and install Google Desktop Search. Now be sure to pay attention to the settings that by default reset your homepage to Google and send crash data back to the mother ship. Uncheck those if you don't want them. A search box will show up in the task bar. The search field works similarly to its online search showing you search suggestions as you type and giving you search results that look just like they do when you search for websites, but they're actually locations on your local machine. You also get a side panel you can use to dock Widgets. Perk or annoyance, you decide. You can always hide it. As an alternative, get the Copernic Desktop from Copernic.com. This one does not try to change your homepage. Copernic Desktop gives you a nice buttoned up look with a tab interface organized by the type of content you're looking for, documents, e-mails, contacts, favorites, and so on. Copernic Desktop has a premium version too. Now the free version comes with advertising, so for 50 bucks, you can get rid of the ad slots and get Outlook search, result as you type, network drive indexing and save searches. The searching Outlook is a great feature, but it's one you could also get by installing the free Outlook ad-on called Xobni. That's it for this Quick Tip, you can find Copernic Desktop search, Google Desktop and Xobni for free at our very own Download.com. I'm Tom Merritt, happy searching. ^M00:01:39 [ Music ]