Product Reviews

Offering both standalone and deskbar access, Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) doesn't follow the pack with an all-encompassing search. Instead, you must specify a category first. This is less long-winded than it sounds, and search types are divided between Internet (web, images, news and shopping) and Computer (email, files, music, pictures, video, contacts, bookmarks and history, which is disabled by default).

The benefit of this prefiltering approach is that initial results are more accurate. Searches can be refined further too, depending on file type. It's also possible to search within the EXIF metadata of JPEG images - a depth of search that simply doesn't exist elsewhere on this page.

When switching between search categories, the results appear instantly, because Copernic has already prefetched them. If you're in any doubt as to the power of the Copernic pedigree, both Boolean operators and

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nested searches within parenthesis are supported, and new and updated content is indexed on-the-fly for near-instant results. The ability to index emails as they appear in your inbox is currently limited to Outlook only, though.

Initial indexing was fast enough at three hours, 26 minutes, but because of the nature of CDS searching, we couldn't run a directly comparable global search. However, 648 matching emails were returned in just 1.58 seconds, and the switch to return 34 documents with a 'file' search took an impressive 0.38 seconds.

There's support for the Mozilla Thunderbird email client (as well as Outlook and Eudora), including indexing of emails, attachments and contact data, along with support for Firefox bookmarks and cache. Network drives can be indexed, and an intelligent detection function makes short work of network searching.

The integrated file viewer boasts an embedded player for both audio and video files, filmstrip image viewing and even a dedicated Contacts viewing pane. As well as being accurate, it's fast to render. Even PDF files (minus images) appear in seconds. Colour-coded keyword highlighting and the ability to jump to the next highlighted occurrence with one click are the icing on the cake.

There's only one area where CDS falls short, and that's in choosing alltheweb.com for web searches (a default that isn't configurable) instead of Google. But this is no great stumbling block, and Copernic remains our Desktop search client of choice.