Of the myriad desktop search utilities that have hit the market over the past couple of years, Copernic Desktop Search is generally regarded as the most powerful — and arguably the best — among them.
After almost two years and several incremental updates, there's now a major update of CDS
available. As with the previous version (1.7) of CDS, the new Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 runs on Windows XP, 2000, Me, and 98, and integrates with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Outlook, and Outlook Express, as well as with Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird.
2.0's New Interface
The previous generation of CDS sported a user interface that was competent, if basic and a bit bland. In CDS 2.0, however, the interface gets a fairly major overhaul. Copernic claims the new UI is "lighter," and while we don't know about that, it is more attractive and user-friendly than before, and we find it better organized and more informative as well.
CDS 2.0 has a cleaner two-pane design than its predecessor, with the category icons (e-mails, music, pictures, etc.) shifted rightward. When you perform a search, those icons display the number of hits found in each category. There's also a new menu bar that provides easier access to various configuration options, like the ability to show or hide the preview pane, which can now also be displayed on the right as well as the bottom (the bottom is the only option with 1.x).
To help make repetitive queries quicker, CDS 2.0 lets you save them with a My Searches feature that is accessible from the menu bar. As you use the feature, previously performed searches are also made available in the lower-left corner of the application window.
My Searches comes with a dozen pre-defined searches like today's e-mails or pictures from the last 30 days, and it essentially functions like bookmarks do in a browser. You can organize your My Searches entries, but only by reordering them — you can't organize them into folders as you can with bookmarks.
Search and Ye Shall Find
CDS 2.0 still lets you search across a variety of file and information categories such as documents, music, photos, and videos (Copernic claims support for over 150 different file types), as well as e-mails, contacts, browser history, and bookmarks/favorites. (For browser history and bookmarks, CDS 2.0 supports Mozilla and Netscape in addition to IE and Firefox). There's also a Web link to automatically search the Internet for your term at Copernic.com without having to re-type the term when the page appears.
New to CDS 2.0 is the ability to choose "All" as your search category to search through all categories at once. Although CDS already cross references search terms across other categories, 2.0 doesn't limit you to viewing the results one category at a time or require you to arbitrarily pick a category to initiate your search.
If you're prone to typos or spelling errors, you'll appreciate CDS 2.0's query correction feature. When you type in a search term that CDS thinks you may have misspelled, it will offer you a suggested alternate spelling. It does this as you type, and offers the correction off to the side instead of obtrusively overwriting what you've entered (helpful, for example, when you really were searching for "magick" rather than magic).
When you're refining your searches by specifying additional parameters (i.e. the subject line of an e-mail), CDS will display a drop-down menu containing various choices to complete the entry culled from the search index. CDS 2.0 also gives you more ways to refine your search terms — for many categories, you can now narrow down your results by specifying a file name (or limiting your search to a specific folder) after you've initiated a search with a keyword.
CDS has always allowed the use of search operators like AND, OR, and NOT, but v2.0 has also added support for NEAR, so you can now search for terms that are in close proximity to other terms (in this case, within ten words).
