Desktop search, which one?

[Michael Bach (gmx)]

Hello all,

for years now I keep building up my library of research publications,
mostly pdf's, rest ps's, very little html. Over the years, I tried
various ways of organizing them, none of them worked properly.
To cut a long story short, the whole thing is a mess. The only way I see
me coping with this chaos is a search system.

One of the "must have" features is a proper indexing of pdf's and ps'.
On the "good to have" side would be a query language which allows
granular control over the results (boolean term combinations, exclusion
of terms, filetypes, ...).
I would buy these, especially the first requirement, on expense of
indexing speed. I can totally neglect the initial index creation time.
Also, since the directories in question are mainly static, with only a
few additions a month, I could run a scheduled indexing every fortnight
or so over night.

I tried strigi for a day. Index creation took it's time but I didn't
mind. However, I was under the impression that it didn't like many of my
pdf's an lots of the ps's? Hence, it's all gone the "aptitude purge
strigi-*"-way

Before playing around with some other search system (I guess beagle
would be next), can someone please give me some advice on search systems
good on pdf and ps files. Or maybe there is even a better way to get my
pdf-ps-chaos sorted.

regards, Mike.