Ordinary Nothing

After a recommendation from a commenter here, and various good opinions on the web, I decided to also try the Copernic Desktop Search program as a computer search tool.

I used the 1.2 version, got rid of it, and lately installed the 1.5
beta version. The review is true for the 1.5 beta build 624, but most
thing would be the same for the 1.2 version if not explicitly stated
otherwise.

Pro:

• The interface is clear, and very easy to use. It’s less useful, and wastes more "screen real-estate" than YDS, but it’s elegant and has a "professional/serious" feel to it.
• Intuitive search refinement. Like a combo-box for file date, which
  has standalone answers like "today" or "this month", but also "after",
  "before" and "between" which open additional fields for dates that were
  previously hidden as long as they were irrelevant.
• Indexes changes. That is, it monitors for addition of new files (or
  file changes?), and index them in real time. This is a huge improvement
  over scheduled scanning (like YDS does) for several reasons:
  • It takes less HD
    resources when nothing has changed. Not that scanning the disk for
    change is an heavy duty, but if the disk is constantly working, it’s
    noticeable. I had YDS
    installed on two computers, one which is mostly idle, and one with
    constant disk activity. On the one with the disk activity, the
    schedules scans were very noticeable, but Copernic was smooth.
  • When something does change you have it indexed almost immediately. No need to change for the next indexing time.
• Preview for a large amount of file types. Common file types that I tried were all previewable.
• Fast searching. For the things which are indexed, files matching various keyword combinations were shown relatively quickly.
• Result count in other categories. The results are separate for
  general files, emails, audio, pictures, video, etc… But when running
  a search on one category you get a view of result count in the others.

Con:

• No fall-back in case of errors. For example, I had a few
  non-standard xml files. It tried to show them using it’s xml viewer,
  and failed. Instead of showing them as text instead, I got an error
  message with the problem the parser/viewer encountered. This is fine if
  it was my file and I wanted to debug it, but not on the general case
  when it’s not. I think it should at least show an option to show as
  next-best-thing, which would be text in this case.
• No Hebrew support. Oh, it’s possible to enter Hebrew text in the
  search text box. But it doesn’t index it, and doesn’t find it. Worse,
  it can’t show Hebrew on previewed files. I assume this problem isn’t
  just for Hebrew, but for other languages as well.
• Slow preview for large text files. I have an IM
  log file slightly larger than 1MB. When I choose it on the search
  results, it could take a couple of minutes to load it on the preview
  pane, during which the Copernic program is unresponsive, and so is
  Windows Explorer. On the 1.2 version it was worse, and I gave up and
  killed the process after five minutes of waiting. So even randomly
  browsing through returned results can hang the program for a long
  duration.
• It doesn’t index the same log file. There is a setup option of not
  indexing content of files above a certain size, but I keep it at the
  default of 50MB. Yet searching for strings contained within this log
  file does not return it in the result list. Searching for strings in
  the file name does. Other, much smaller, log files are returned when
  searching for words in their content. This is a big problem, both because I can’t count on the program to fetch files it’s supposed to index, and because it’s not documented.
• The indexing of Thunderbird
  email isn’t working in this version, despite this being exclaimed as
  finally included in the 1.5 beta. When going to search in the email
  category I’m told that email indexing is disabled, and provided a link
  to open the settings dialog to fix it. But I fixed it. I specified that
  emails for Thunderbird
  would be indexed, and emails for Outlook won’t. It just doesn’t pay any
  attention. It’s not that it claims there aren’t any indexed, which
  would be a different problem. It claims I didn’t enable indexing of
  emails.

I got rid of the 1.2 version due to the problem of it hanging over
large text files. It made it unusable for me. The 1.5 beta isn’t very
much better, since the files are still not indexed, but it doesn’t hang
the computer, so it’s usable. Currently the computer with the high disk
activity is running Copernic 1.5 beta, but the one with low disk
activity is running YDS…

My main conceptual problem with Copernic at this stage is that it
feels like a stable and complete program, yet has those problems. YDS
also has some big problems, but it still feel like a program in
development stages, so it’s somehow less problematical. It’s all in my
head, of course, since what really matter is functionality, but still.

March 9th, 2005 at 0:57 EET | Categories: Reviews, Web | Track comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.