desktop search

[D. R. Evans]

Is it just me, or does desktop search basically suck in Kubuntu?

I have been using Kerry for a while. Or, rather, trying to use it.
There doesn't seem to be anything to configure, so if I have it
misconfigured somehow, it's not obvious how to make it work better.
Maybe there's a better tool?

This is going to sound like a whine. It isn't. I am hoping desperately
that there's some way to make desktop search work usefully and that
I've just overlooked something really simple.

Right now, on my main desktop machine, even for simple things it seems
fairly useless :-(

1. Search for a term that I know is in my Kopete message history. OK
it, finds the term, but it doesn't seem to have any concept that a
conversation that took place today is different from one that happened
yesterady. It seems to report conversations in huge chunks in which
individual conversations with an individual are concatenated, but
without any indication of the date/time at which each took place. Nor
is it obviuos how it decides when to put a conversation into a
different chunk.

2. Search for a term that I know is in a Thunderbird e-mail -- no hits.

3. Search for a term for which there are a lot of hits (I tried this
with "port") -- Kerry informs you that there are (for example) 118
hits, but only shows you five of them at a time. (And it does so in
remarkably space-inefficient way.)

4. There is no help. None.

5. It simply fails to find text that I know exists in files on my
drive. (For example, I have two python scripts that contain the text
"source ports" -- Kerry gives me four hits for "source ports", but
none of them are my python scripts.)

  Doc