Instant Desktop Search applications are a new breed of desktop search applications which are capable of indexing your hard disk almost instantly. Gone are the days of waiting hours for your desktop search application to finish indexing. These software leverage the metadata of your file system to index GBs of data in just a few seconds. Last year I reviewed Everything Search and neoSearch. While Everything Search offered more functionality, neoSearch was a hell of a lot lighter on system resources.
InSight Desktop Search belongs to the same category. It took less than 90 seconds to index 30GB of data (21,000 files). InSight Desktop Search offers an easily accessible search bar on the desktop through which all the functionalities of the tool is available.
InSight focuses heavily on multimedia content. You can search for music files based on tags like Artist Name, Album Name and so on. A nice feature is the ability to preview the music file within InSight itself. You can also export the files as a standard m3u playlist and play them in your favourite media player.
InSight Preview also works with Text, Image and Video Files. Simply hovering over the search result reveals more information about it along with a preview (if available) InSight search can also double up as an application launcher. You can add any application or website to it’s Quick Launch section. Support for Wikipedia has also been thrown in for good measure.
InSight really excels in it’s presentation. However, I was slightly disappointed with its core functionality – search. You can filter results according to their type (Directories, Media Files, Applications etc). Unfortunately that’s about it. InSight doesn’t support any advanced search queries. I also found the lack of “Always On Top” option annoying.
In spite of the above mentioned shortcomings InSight Desktop Search impressed me. However, it consumed more system resources than I would have preferred (around 35MB RAM). Thankfully, due to rapid index generation speed you don’t need to have it running in the background. If features are what you are after then you would be better served by traditional search applications like Google Desktop Search. However, InSight Desktop Search is a good option for someone who is looking for an instant desktop search application and doesn’t really want advanced features.
Download InSight Desktop Search(2.72 MB)
InSight Desktop Search Website
Platforms Supported : Windows Xp,Vista and Windows 7
License : Freeware
Version Reviewed : 2.0.16.21
The interface sure looks good. But can it really index that fast? Is it indexing all the data?
.-= chinmoy´s last blog ..Find A Song From Lyrics Excerpts =-.
All files (other than hidden files) are indexed.
.-= Pallab´s last blog ..How To : Enable Smooth Scrolling Across Browsers in Windows =-.
For last few years I have been used to Locate32, with current beta also giving search as you type, like google search. Though it doesn’t index meta info, just file names, most of the time I am searching for the file name only, so not much issue with me. What I liked about Locate32 is, it does what it is supposed to do. Generate a small index of few MBs and search using that index. Can InSight manage this better than locate32?
I have heard a lot about the advanced search queries supported by Locate32. Gotta try it out sometime.
Just tried InSight today!..and was really impressed with the non intrusive nature of the software!…It doesn’t support advanced search querries..but I found the sub-search feature more than sufficient for my needs!.Was able to to do basic AND and NOT searches using the sub-search and also was able to filter out files based on their locations!..
Just checked out their website..A new version is out that also supports “WMA” files !
Lets see for couple of more days…Will it replace AVA-FIND on my PC or not???
I am glad that you found this useful.
If you are talking about indexing of 30 GB hdd i.e. 21,000 files in less than 90 seconds…. checkout FireDragon Search…. it can index 4,34,094 files in less than 50 sec!!! i think u should really review it!!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct7FT3RIEsI