Copernic Desktop Search is an alternative to Windows search that aims to make the search process quicker and easier to manage.
Using Windows' built-in desktop search is a bit of a struggle. The more information you have on your computer, the slower it is and sometimes it can take a long time. Copernic Desktop Search is a contender in the battle for the best desktop search tool around.
When you install the program, it will index your computer so it knows what to search. This is an amazingly quick process. In fact, Copernic Desktop Search was so quick that we thought it hadn't been done¡! It automatically re-indexes after that, waiting for idle periods to make sure its search stays up to date on your documents. The file indexing schedule is completely customizable.
Copernic Desktop Search interface has lots of ads - which it euphemistically calls 'web results' - and you can't get rid of them. That's not the case with the other aspects of the interface - there is a main search box and results are displayed under tab-like icons that allow you to refine by music, files, images and more.
Once you select a certain area - say emails - you can refine further by date/size, etc. All of these options are customizable, and there are additional search options in the Copernic Desktop Search taskbar and in a toolbar on your web browser.
Undoubtedly the most important aspect of any desktop search app is the results. Copernic Desktop Search was incredibly fast, but sometimes missed results that seemed obvious. Results improved when we manually updated the index, which makes us think that special attention is required when configuring the indexing options.
In its favor, Copernic Desktop Search results are easy to see and classify, and the multiple refining options make sifting through large numbers of documents very easy. If you don't have that much to index however, Copernic Desktop Search doesn't seem a huge improvement on alternative search apps like Google Desktop.
Copernic Desktop Search provides fast indexing, but isn't always accurate.
