I’ve been using Copernic Desktop Search for several months now and I think it’s really a great program, especially as it is free. I’ve recently tried X1, to see if I’m missing anything, but I decided that for the steep price there’s not enough X1 can offer me. This is even more true for the new (beta) version 1.5 of CDS, where a lot of features have been added. Although things have been extended a lot, there are still a lot of features that are restricted for no apparent reason. Here’s my list of things I’d like to see implemented/changed in CDS. In case anybody at Copernic reads this… personally, I’d be willing to pay a price for CDS, it doesn’t have to be free. I also have licenses for Agent Professional, Tracker and Summarizer. Just don’t make it as expensive as X1 :-)

  • Search overall. Why do I always have to specify first which kind of file I’m searching for?
  • For Thunderbird, index at least all locally stored folders, including offline folders. I’m using Thunderbird with IMAP, and apart from several weirdly named folders (like 02c67ac5), I can only select my RSS folders for indexing, nothing else. Some of my IMAP and news group folders are offline folders and could be indexed as such.
  • For Outlook, index appointments and notes. I don’t use Outlook for mail or contacts, so that support is useless for me.
  • Index favourites and history for more than one browser. Who uses just one browser these days? Why does there have to be a restriction to only one browser?
  • Indexing of OneNote data. At least this could be added by a custom extractor (I have an upcoming post on that) in the future.
  • Indexing of IMAP mail servers.
  • Configuration for the allowance of system load. Currently I can’t influence when CDS thinks my system’s resources are highly used, and therefore stops indexing. There are often very many processes running on my system and CDS stops indexing much too often. Nevertheless, generally the Copernic implementation of unintrusive background indexing works great, compared with X1 again.