The awesomest, most amazing Desktop Search App Ever, And I mean that Options

[Amazing Andrew]

I am still in awe of this program. I cannot fathom how it does what it does and so fast.

The program is called Everything. It's a desktop search engine program, like Google Desktop or the (laughable) built-in search function in Windows.

This little program kicks Google Desktops hindquarters, and kicks it hard.

It's small, simple, and extremely, blisteringly, laws-of-physics-violatingly fast. Here's my setup:

I have three physical drives partitioned into seven volumes. Four of these are accessible to Windows (the other three are Linux volumes.) All of the four accessible volumes are formatted in NTFS and have an aggregate capacity of 439.39GB. Total usage of these drives is 215.94GB. or about 49%. There are way more than 1,000,000 files all together (I didn't count, though).

No more than ten seconds after I installed Everything, I ran a test search:


The search, as you can see, was for *micro*.pdf. We power searchers will appreciate the wildcard (* and ?) support, boolean (AND, OR, NOT) operator and regex support.

Results were instantaneous. I couldn't believe it! This program had not had any chance at all to index my hard drives, yet it found all the files that matched my query, instantly!

Also, the search results were updated as I typed!

You there, the person reading this: go download this program now. It's free!

Note: I am NOT connected with this program or its maker in any way whatsoever. This is my genuine opinion. I am impressed, and it's not easy to impress me.

This post has been edited by Amazing Andrew: Jun 12 2009, 08:59 PM

Reason for edit: Tpyo

[DSTM]

I agree.I have had "Everything" for some time,and find it invaluable, to find anything on my Computer,almost instantly.
Would not be without this amazing program.

[thcbytes]

Downloaded and running. Pretty slick Andrew. Thanks!

[MadDawg]

Perfect. I hated Window's search function. Thanks.

[M...]

That's absolutely awesome and amazing, Andrew.

For me, the most important aspect of a search is absolute accuracy. I rarely need to search for a file on my system, but when I do, I don't want to be at the mercy of even the possibility of inaccurate results due to a "stale" cache, an undetected system change, or the like. Additionally, I don't want my system to be burdened or bothered by any "optimization" of a function that I may use only once a month.

The following is a slight modification of the default shortcut for Everything. It rebuilds Everything's database from scratch each time Everything is started. Everything does not start at system (XP) startup, nor does any part of Everything run in the background after exiting Everything. There is never any chance of any database information getting out of synch or being inconsistent. Everything impacts the system only when I am actually, actively using it:

http://img189.imageshack.us/img189/4490/scrn003a.png

On my XP Pro SP3 800MHz Pentium III system with 352,439 files, it takes only about 35 seconds to rebuild the Everything database from scratch when I start Everything to search for something. As Amazing Andrew pointed out, the actual seaching occurs as fast as I type the search string; when I'm finished typing, the results are there. That 35-second startup time (induced by my change) is a small price to pay for absolute accuracy in the search and absolutely no overhead of any kind associated with any part of Everything running except precisely when I need it.

And to think that, up until now, I was (gratefully) tolerating the 10-minute search time (I just ran a test) required by the Windows Search in an environment where drive indexing was disabled (for all the good reasons that drive indexing in Windows should be disabled).

[Amazing Andrew]

Thanks for the tip, M...!

[rowal5555]

Totally agree AA.

I have used this utility constantly since I came across it months ago, and the speed never fails to astound me.

[buddy215]

I just sent this to my cousin who is trying to get rid of Yoog and has to delete all of Firefox.
Windows search proved itself incompetent to find even the profile. Missed about ten files.

She used EVERYTHING and it found and deleted what looks like everything Firefox in a flash.

So Andrew, here is a cyberhug from my cuz. Thanks!!

[ranger72]

Magnificent program!

Thank you Andrew


ranger72

[Yourhighness]

cool find. downloading it now. although i must say that i currently use "locate" for searching. works similar and hasnt failed on me either thus far searching my roughly 850GB hdd storage.

[Nigelajodha]

Got it to work. Apparently the zip file has some issues with my PC. I tried the winRAR version ( portable) and it works perfectly. It is fast REALLLL Fast

This post has been edited by Nigelajodha: Jul 6 2009, 04:57 PM

[HydraHeaded]

This definitely is the best search app ever. I had saved a thousand web pages or so, and I just used this and it indexes them all in a jiffy.

[MightyFlye]

Wow. To think I've been using the default search feature all this time.
Everything is sweet, thanks!!

[man4590]

fastest i have used

[tork]

thanks Amazing Andrew for the original post and M... for the tip