Many small businesses are now moving into their second or even third decade of computerization. That means they have piles and piles of archival data. At the same time, hard disks are getting bigger and bigger and cheaper and cheaper, so the temptation is to keep all that stuff — and the challenge of quickly finding information on a PC or network is getting closer to impossible.
The company's new X1 Search program ($99), a supercharged successor to a now-discontinued freeware version dubbed Find, promises to do for desktops what Google does for the Web. It can locate any file on any local or network drive, as well as any Microsoft Outlook contact, or even any word in any Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, or Netscape e-mail message or attachment.
The program displays a list of files or messages on one side of its screen and the selected item, in formatted context, on the other. You can even choose to highlight search terms or automatically scroll to the first instance of a term. And it all happens much faster than Windows' or Outlook's own search functions — almost as fast as you can type a search string.
Shows All the Signs
Does X1 Search live up to its promise? Yes, with a few reservations. The big ones are that it doesn't allow you to do Boolean searches as Google does (e.g., cat OR feline), or search for phrases. Both those features will be added to the product soon, X1 promises, and its search syntax does provide lots of flexibility in other ways.
Downloading and installing X1 Search went without a hitch, though setup gave me a brief scare: Before X1 Search can do its work, it must index the files on your hard disk, beginning this process as soon as you launch the program for the first time. As part of the indexing process, the program copies e-mail file attachments — including those in Outlook Express's Deleted Items folder — to a temporary folder. Since my Deleted Items folder often contains messages with virus-infected attachments, McAfee VirusScan issued numerous alerts that seemed to involve infected files from the download of X1 Search.
Fortunately, the panic was brief; by the time I tried to delete the offending files, they were already gone from the X1 temp folder. An X1 representative responded immediately to my urgent e-mail, explaining what was going on and that I could configure Search's indexing to skip messages in the Deleted Items folder.
On my system, the initial indexing took almost two hours. After that, the program updates its index at regular intervals — which you can set separately for each type of searchable content, and which takes only seconds or minutes. You can keep working with other applications while X1 Search is indexing, but the latter uses a lot of system resources, so things slow down considerably; one program wouldn't respond at all, though these hangups disappeared after the indexing procedure was complete.
X1 provides an excellent tutorial at its Web site, but the software's clever, intuitive design makes it superfluous: Key in a search term and a list of hits starts to assemble instantly. Add additional terms and the list shrinks.
