DocFetcher

For looking inside documents, even though there are good alternatives, I'd say this is the absolute best. And I've tried all I've come across. No learning curve, you just tipe anything more or less related with what you're looking for in ordinary language and it will give you results. Almost immediately too. Only problem is, even the so called portable needs Java installed. This was the reason I finally decided to give it up and move on. BUT, since I found no other as satisfying I decided to give it another try. And I've just found that, with portable Java in the same folder as docfetcher and a little tweak in the docfetcher.bat file (which you can find in "https://sourceforge.net/p/docfetcher/discussion/702424/thread/430d6676/?limit=25" if this is ok. for me to say) you no longer need to install Java in your PC and can even launch the program from a USB. As a result you'll need to launch it from the .bat, not from the .exe, so you can't pin it to the taskbar and so on but, aside from that, it works like a charm.

The idea is good and description in their site too, also open source is a big plus but in comparising to Eerything it is very slow imo, also has no comfortable multiple selection, nor multi rename.

Does the job more or less if you show it some love. If you have the money and want a better out-of-the-experience the paid software is the way to go.

PROS

✔ works well, once configured ✔ free ✔ portable ✔ fast results ✔ some options available ✔ incremental indexing ✔ focussed indexing

CONS

– a lot of trial and error to configure
– needs more gui options
– gui odd in some ways
– indexer dies on big/weird files.
– indexing many files could take days.

Crashed at first due to memory limits but this went away after the suggested workarounds.

I liked and used Docfetcher for Windows for a few years on a corporate managed PC. It was one of the few desktop search options after the high bar set by Google Desktop Search which I loved and was super easy. 😢 I've also tried X1 and Copernic-Trial and liked X1 the best, but that cost the most money.

This product should not be listed as an alternative to filename-only indexers like Everything. It "looks inside" at the contents of files not just the filename. DocFetcher actually makes a good companion use alongside a filename-indexer like Everything.

It worked fine when I used an x86 Windows 8.1 system. After I upgraded to 64 bit it no longer worked on the new system. I have both java 1.8* and Python x64 installed, but it fails to launch. I had to move to another program. Luckily, I already had one ready. It is a very old abandonware — searchinformdeskfree4.0.exe The free version only allows 1 index at a time. There are no other serious limitations. And I make 2 indexes and mount/unmount them to use them one at a time. I can create an infinite amount of indexes, but have to use one at a time. That's it. So, it's a good replacement for DocFetcher. It also had a selection of indexes. The new program also compresses its index much better, it is clearly much more compact. So, goodbye, DocFetcher.

I've used this for several years on multiple folders of lots of different document types, including Outlook PSTs. For a open-source, free, and unfortunately unmaintained application it has worked extremely well for me.

I learned to copy the data files of interest (>50GB) as well as the indexes, etc. into a new folder structure to do backups. I've been able to restore those backups to other systems successfully. The whole shebang can even be run on a USB drive.

Useful if you have a single folder where everything goes and you cannot find your files there (not a good solution but My Documents becomes such a folder sometimes). Yes, you need to change the list to be searched from time to time, but for folders smaller than the whole partition - it works fine.

I use this search program at work and at home to track down information . The advanced search options - based on the Apache Lucine project - are not just smart but amazingly useful versus so many other options.

Smart, free, fast, and cross-platform search.