Apple, Linux and Open-Source Support
Most of the available desktop search tools are Windows-centric. Google, Yahoo!, Copernic and Ask, for example, don't offer non-Windows versions of their tools. There are tools available for other operating systems, and there are even open-source desktop search tools available. For instance, Mac OS X Tiger comes with Spotlight (www.apple.com/ macosx/features/spotlight), an excellent desktop search tool that's integrated with the Tiger menu bar.
For Linux, Beagle is an open-source desktop tool that searches content for common Linux applications such as OpenOffice, KMail and Evolution for e-mail and calendaring, Gaim for instant messages, Firefox, Epiphany and Konqueror for browser history, as well as common video, audio and image file formats. Beagle is written in C# with the Mono project (.NET for Linux), and uses a C# version of Lucene (http://lucene .apache.org) as the indexer and search engine.
As for other open-source desktop search tools, there are two that look promising: The File Seeker and Lucene Nutch (both in beta form). The File Seeker is an open-source desktop search tool available from SourceForge (http:// sourceforge.net/projects/fileseeker) that is available in C++ and Delphi, and supports Windows versions from Windows 95 to Windows XP. Nutch (http://lucene.apache.org/nutch) builds on Lucene, which is written in Java and is consequently multiplatform. It adds support for indexing, crawling and parsing content in multiple formats.
Some organizations may be interested in using open-source search tools because they provide complete transparency into the algorithms used to rank search results. Most commercial vendors view this as intellectual property, and therefore don't expose their algorithms. This leads to the suspicion that results can be ranked based on vendor partnership or other, commercial, agreements. The use of open-source tools avoids this, and allows organizations with specific requirements to rank results as they see fit.
