Zmarties

Scoble has a well thought out Desktop Search Reviewers Guide which covers much of what you might want to consider when choosing a desktop search product.

I think his 16 items list covers most things, but one area he doesn't cover well is "what are its actual search capabilities?"

To go into more detail on this point, I'm looking to see:

• does it offer "search as you type"
• can you search for filenames, as well as searching within the file contents
• can you do wildcard searches
• can you do soundex searches, when you say can't remember exactly how you spelt something
• can you do case sensitive searches
• can searches be arbitrarily complex, or are you restricted in the number of terms you can include in the search
• can you save searches you need to do regularly (as bookmarks, or some other save mechanism)

He also doesn't raise too many questions about how the results are presented. Again, I'm looking to see:

• does the result page show a contextual snippet of the matches
• can the results "preview" the document found, so that its possible to search and find information in files without having to open the document in its original application