Best Free Software for Windows

Desktop Search Utility

Copernic Desktop Search is a powerful search engine that is designed to find files and emails.

exalead Desktop Search is a powerful and flexible search tool. This tool first indexes your computer and then updates the index when the computer is idle. Once it has indexed your computer the results are instantaneous. The free desktop version is full featured and shows hits by relevance, or date, or counts by subdirectory, author, size, document type, etc. It also supports phonetic and related searches. Search results look a bit like google, but with the addition of the document or file name, directory, date and file information. Two very useful features are the tree views showing where in the directory tree structure the hits are, and the results by year and month.

Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed, and more.

Agent Ransack is a search tool like the built in Windows search but with a lot more features and options. It makes it easy to select what drive or directories you are searching and you can do advanced complex rule based searches. It does not maintain a master index so, just like the Windows search, you will have to wait for the engine to read the files before getting your results.

X1 enables you to search and instantly find information, preview it in its native format and take action on it immediately regardless of type or location.