Yahoo Desktop search is elegant. It’s not perfect, but it’s very quick, and has important advantages over Google’s. It doesn’t rely on IE; it can be tweaked to search openoffice files and display their context in plain text — actually more useful than the formatted display of word files; I cna have it search my browser cache if I want. It might search Opera email, but there’s no need, since the whole point of Opera as an email client is its searching and indexing. YDS has, however, indexed all my old mail archives from the Bat, which is something I have wanted for ages.
Against this, the actual search interface is ugly and unintuitive. The indexing is intrusive and chews up CPU time. The indexes are gigantic. But none of these things matter very much beside its virtues. I can learn the interface, and like anyone else who had bought a PC in the last three years, I have more disk space and CPU cycles than I can exhaust.
I was very disappointed to find, when I finally upgraded to a version of Windows that could run Google desktop search that it would not index my emails. That was one of my key objectives in downloading it.
what do you use for email? YDS only knows outlook as a specifically email program. But it will index other mailboxes as plain text.
YDS is X1, a commercial product on the market for a couple of years, but only recently attaining maturity (or at least late adolescence).
http://www.x1.com/
I use X1, and they tell me that they will continue to market their own version, apart from YDS. For e-mail it indexes Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and Netscape. Of course, it will cost you some (gasp) money, $75 to be exact. But don’t feel bad… I paid $100. Still, it’s been worth every penny.