Dear Reader,

After some sucessful searching the web with the Ask Search Engine I thought about trying the “Ask Desktop Search” Software. I needed to index my pdfs, so I could do a full text search on them.

Apparently, this little program does not send my data out onto the web, like googles desktop search does. A big plus. Also, you can configure which directories should be indexed. So far, so good.

The whole experiment was a big mess:

The first annoying thing was, that when I downloaded it through Firefox and started it directly out of the firefox download manager, the installation programm complained I had to close all running instances of firefox.

The installation programm obviously wants to mess with my Firefox browser. Something I did not want. I want to index my local filesystem. That’s all.

When I actually gave in and closed my firefox instances, it still would not proceed with the installation. Well, of course not, firefox could not be properly closed, because the setup process itself was spawned by firefox. So I restarted the installer. This time directly from the download directory.

Again no sucess, same problem. When looking at the processes running, there was still an instance of firefox.exe alive. The windows were gone however. Obviously firefox was not terminated even after its child process, the installer was dead. The only way is to manually kill the firefox.exe process from the task manager. A killer feature! (The same happens, when you try to uninstall )

So i had finally installed my little program.

I did not want to index my whole disk, just the pdfs. The program did not care much and started indexing happily. Everything! After doing some changes on the settings to restrict this behaviour, the indexing paused. There was neither a way to wipe the already started index nor to unpause indexing. By restarting my machine, indexing seemed to work.

Two days later, when I sat at my machine, all programs were crying and bleeding: No more disk space on drive C! I ran TreeSize to find out who caused the trouble. Guess what happend? Ask Desktop Search build up its index in C:\Documents and Settings\remote\Application Data\AskDS. Over 2 Gigabytes of space were already used up by it and there were 0 bytes left on the disk.

Great! The developers assumed I wanted their program to index onto drive C. Furthermore they assumed, there is indefinite space to use up. Beginners usually don’t consider these real world constraints.

Before sending the whole thing to nirvana, I did some test searches. It found file names propertly. Full text, in-document search did not work!

This product has been realased a bit too prematurely. My advice: do not use it.

I will right now download the google desktop search program and try to block its “phone back home” behaviour with the firewall…

Google desktop: I could not even finish the install without internet access

It stayed hanging like on the picture… I need the “spotlight” application that the mac users have… where is it?

Thank you.