desktop search

[D. R. Evans]

On 07/11/06, Lord Sauron <lordsauronthegreat at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have no experience with kerry beagle outside of gnome, but I do know
> that it has the ability to index only certain areas...  lemme see if I
> can find the config file.
>
> <opens terminal in SLED 10.1 - very nice and shiny by the way>
>
> You should find kerry beagle stuff in ~/.beagle
>

Yeah, there's some directories there. No idea what they do, though. I
wouldn't dare touch any of them.

In any case, it seems pretty clear (to me, anyway; others may
disagree) that desktop search in Linux is very much in its infancy.
All the entrants in the race seem to be very rough as yet. Not that
there's anything at all wrong with that. It's just that having been
reading hype about desktop dearch for something like 18 months now, I
was kind of hoping that there was a practical tool that might be
usable, but it seems not.

I do realise that it's a hard problem to do desktop search properly.
Finding stuff is only half the battle; it has to be shown in its
correct context too (IM conversations, calendar appointents, ODT or
PDF documents, etc), and of course it has to be fast and thorough. So
I'll just keep waiting and periodically testing the waters.

Thanks to everyone for their suggestions, etc.