Desktop search?

[Frank616]

Google Desktop Search was a wonderfully useful product. Sadly, Google has stopped development, and old binaries won't run on newer distros.

Nepomuk / Strigi are SO BAD that they are effectively useless, at least in my experience in searching LO files.

So, what else is available?

Frank.

[vinnywright]

if you don’t mind the CLI locate is a good search tool ...
LO files?

vinny@Vinnys-HP-G62:~$ locate Resumay
/home/vinny/Resumay
/home/vinny/Resumay~

see

man locate

some times it spits out a LOT of info then I pipe it through less so I can page through the output
if the files are new you may half to update the data base

sudo updatedb

sorry if this wasent what you were looking for

VINNY

[Frank616]

Vinny:

I'm looking for something that will wade through hundreds of invoices in ODS format, and pick out the ones with specific keywords in it (2004, Audi, red). I use this for my business. I don't want the staff messing with the command line, so I'm looking more for a simple search tool.

If you, or anyone else knows of such a product, I'd be happy to know.

Thanks for the response. My original request was too broad, I realize.

Frank.

[HalationEffect]

Google Desktop Search was a wonderfully useful product. Sadly, Google has stopped development, and old binaries won't run on newer distros.

Nepomuk / Strigi are SO BAD that they are effectively useless, at least in my experience in searching LO files.

So, what else is available?

Frank.

I haven't tried it myself, so I can't say for sure if it will fit the bill, but it might be worth giving "Recoll" a try.

As long as you have the universe and/or multiverse repositories enabled, you should be able to install it from Muon. If you prefer to install it from a CLI, then:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install recoll

[Snowhog]

From the package description:

Description-en: Personal full text search package with a Qt GUI This package is a personal full text search package is based on a very strong
backend (Xapian), for which it provides an easy to use and feature-rich
interface.
.
Features:
* Qt-based GUI
* Supports the following document types (and their compressed versions)
- Natively: text, html, OpenOffice files, maildir and mailbox (Mozilla and
IceDove mail) with attachments, pidgin log files
- With external helpers: pdf (pdftotext), postscript (ghostscript), msword
(antiword), excel, ppt (catdoc), rtf (unrtf)
* Powerful query facilities, with boolean searches, phrases, filter on file
types and directory tree
* Support for multiple charsets, Internal processing and storage uses Unicode
UTF-8
* Stemming performed at query time (can switch stemming language after
indexing)
* Easy installation. No database daemon, web server or exotic language
necessary
* An indexer which runs either as a thread inside the GUI or as an external,
cron'able program

[vinnywright]

well Recoll may be what you want .
I just installed it to test and it will indeed almost instently find a document with say "vincent" in it somewhere,, not just the document name......after it dose a long indexing the first time you run it .
you can of course exclude search paths and such from the indexing and it has highly customizable search strings .......nice
download all the recommends and suggested with it


VINNY

[Snowhog]

Just added the “recoll-backports” team ppa (for the latest release, version 1.17.3). Man is it fast. I accepted the defaults and had it index my home partition.

[blackpaw]

Nice find!

And a pretty sad commentary on nepomuk

[Frank616]

HalationEffect:

I haven't tried it myself, so I can't say for sure if it will fit the bill, but it might be worth giving "Recoll" a try.

This does indeed look like exactly what I am looking for!

I just installed it, and it is presently indexing. I'll report back later today.

Thanks, all.

Frank.

[Frank616]

By the way, in looking up info on Recoll, I came up with this list of possible alternatives. Unless Recoll is a total bomb (and it don't think so), then there are many others that can be tried.

Frank.

[Frank616]

OK, just got it going. It indexed some 14K ODS files in a few minutes. I have a quad core laptop. It does not appear to index sequentially, near as I can tell from the filenames that went flashing by. It may run several threads at the same time. In any case, it was VERY fast producing the index of the directories that I wanted. I did not let it index my whole disk (at least, not yet.

I just did the model search that I posted earlier, for audi, red, 2008, and the results were almost instantaneous. It will either open the ODS file, or give me a tabbed preview box of the salient information. That preview box is an extraordinary piece of good software engineering, giving me a quick overview of the invoice it has found. LO is slow to load files, so the extremely quick preview box is an added bonus.

I like!!

It may be even better than Google Desktop Search. Sure looks good so far.

I'll do more testing as time goes on. Watch this space.

Frank.

[HalationEffect]

Glad it turned out to be a good suggestion

From the glowing praise I'm seeing for Recoll, I might just have to install it myself.