Google Desktop Search + GDE Enterprise

   Developer: Google
    Official site: www.desktop.google.com/enterprise
    Price: free
    Distribution package size with TweakGDS: 1.2 Mb

A free solution from Google is intended for information retrieval on a personal computer, in Internet and in the corporate network of an enterprise.

Google Desktop Search Enterprise proudly sports the ability to index and search documents in dozens of most widely spread text formats, as well as electronic mail, audio and video files tags and images. NB!: in order to tell the full text search application which files and folders to index, you have to install an additional component gdetweak. Without this add-on Google Desktop Search Enterprise search engine will index all information on the user's computer as well as on all of the accessible computers in the enterprises' network. Google Desktop Search managed to process 20 gigabytes of text within 8 hours 17 minutes. The size of the resulting index was 4,5 Gb. The search speed is quite satisfactory and is on the same level as other broadly acknowledged market participants.

Unlike iSYS and dtSearch, Google Desktop Search Enterprise by right boasts of the most user-friendly interface. As for administering and setting up the work in the local network, however, it yields to its competitors, and the difference is quite tangible. The thing is, it is quite complicated to set up network operation the way you need in a particular situation, because the full text search system tries to do everything for you. The only way to fine tune the information retrieval application is to install additional components. This is a major disadvantage. It goes without saying that as a desktop full text search system Google Desktop Search with the gdetweak component has no equals.

But corporate search engine is still a long run from the current state. The promised search of documents with similar content (in the Internet originally posed as similar pages), leaves much to be desired. Apparently, for this very reason it is not included niether into the "global" desktop nor in the network versions.

The strengths of  Google Desktop Search	The weaknesses of Google Desktop Search
+ searching with account of morphology + searching with account of synonyms + Support of various character sets + a familiar Web interface + work in the local network (Enterprise version) + indexing electronic messages, audio and video files tags and images + free of charge	- the structure of addons*

*The point of the matter is that full scale operation of the full text search application requires downloading and installing a large number of additional modules. In order to show the information retrieval application which files and folders to index, you have to install an additional component gdetweak. Without this add-on Google Desktop Search search engine will index the whole information on user computer and in the network of the enterprise that it can access. The same goes for all other features of this full text search tool. For example, support of archives.