The syntax will be familiar to veterans of Web search engines, though X1 will initially find any word that starts with the letters in your search term; cat, for instance, will turn up catatonic and catchy unless you type cat=. You can use a minus sign to exclude words; there's no equivalent to the plus sign that forces Google to return only pages with the desired term, because X1 Search only returns files or messages that fully match the main search field anyway.
Typing terms in the main search field isn't the only way to zero in on content: You can type search terms in fields above each column in the left-hand screen panel, which displays a list of files or messages found, or reorder a column to bring the item you want closer to the top.
In an e-mail search, for example, you'll see fields for From, To, Subject, Date, Size, and so on; if you remember that the message you want is relatively large or relatively old, for example, you can click the Size or Date column header to sort messages accordingly and get a head start on finding it.
The program provides impressive flexibility in setting options such as which types of files and messages to index and from which locations. These are important, as I found: Because I don't clean out my hard disk as often I should, there's so much dross that default searches frequently found all kinds of things that were irrelevant, even though they met the search terms. You can also dock X1 Search to the top of your Windows display and auto-hide it, so it's invisible unless you move the mouse pointer to the top of the screen.
Making Contact
There's some room for improvement. It would be handy to have a right-click-menu Delete option, for those times when a search turns up a whole pile of files you'd forgotten were there and now want to get rid of.
Similarly, one of the program's most appealing features is the way it indexes contacts from Outlook — not just those in your Outlook address book, but those it extracts from messages. When you find a contact, you can click a button to send that person a message or forward his or her information to somebody else. The catch is that this feature only works with Outlook, not Outlook Express, Eudora, or Netscape.
Still, X1 Search is an excellent product, and support for Boolean and phrase searching and additional e-mail clients will make it even better. If it takes you more than a few seconds to find a file or e-mail message you're looking for, check it out.
