I’ve made no secret of my love for Copernic Desktop Search: It was the first item in my list of five freeware gems I use every day. (David’s a fan, too: He prefers it to Google Desktop.) Version 3.0 of the “search engine for your PC” adds a handful of tweaks and fixes — not all of them ideal, and nothing earth-shattering, but the program is definitely still a gem.
Copernic indexes all the documents, e-mails, multimedia files, contacts, Web favorites, and other stuff on your hard drive for lightning-fast searches. Just type your query into the deskbar and hit Enter: In an instant you’ll see search results in a pop-up window. You can also open the main Copernic window to view the contents of each search hit.
Unfortunately, version 3.0 no longer displays search results as you type. For that feature, along with Outlook note/task/appointment searching and network-drive indexing, you need Copernic Professional, which runs $49.95. But if you can do without that stuff, you should find the free Copernic Home more than sufficient — and a major asset for finding stray files. (If you’re a business user, go ahead and install the Home version — we won’t tell.)
