Off-Topic: A very fast, FREE, Windows file.folder searcher that does not create a permanent index

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Posted by Cassius
Sep 22, 2013 at 10:32 PM

Master Seeker at http://www.master-seeker.com/ .

What I found:
The first time you run Master Seeker it takes a few seconds to create a cache.
Thereafter, when you search for something the results are instantaneous.
If you don’t close it, any succeeding searches will also be instantaneous.

Also, if you search for a file or folder named Hickory Dickory , it will also find items named
HickoryDickory.

Apparently may not work in Win 8.

Posted by jimspoon
Sep 23, 2013 at 03:02 PM

thank you Cassius. I will give master seeker a try. I have relied on Voidtools Everything for years, but am always for more tools.

Your post reminded me of another program to tell the group about - SwiftSearch - which is very fast and a keeper.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/?source=navbar

“SwiftSearch is a lightweight program whose purpose is to help you quickly find the files you need on your Windows machine without ever requiring you to index your drives. Most search utilities that achieve similar speeds do so by indexing drives while the computer is idle, but because idleness detection is so difficult to get right, in practice they end up slowing down the whole system just to speed up search. SwiftSearch works differently: given administrator privileges, it completely bypasses the file system (only NTFS supported) and reads the file table directly every time, which speeds up search by many orders of magnitude. Typically searches yield full results in ~10 seconds or less, a significant speedup for many users. As a bonus, this program also supports path-based search (for example, you can search for “*Program*\Windows*”), regular expressions (just start the search name with ‘>’ character), and full directory sizes. Its goal is to be simple, swift, and intuitive to use.”

Posted by Cassius
Sep 24, 2013 at 07:37 AM

Master Seeker- new information:

I decided to let Master Seeker reside in my system tray so it wouldn’t have to create a new cache each time. I just discovered (but should have known) that if one adds or deletes files/folders then the existing Master Seeker cache is no longer current and it has to create a new cache if you are searching for something you added after its last cache was created.

Posted by MenAgerie
Sep 24, 2013 at 09:13 AM

I have found DocFetcher to be very fast and useful [and free] http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html.
“DocFetcher is an Open Source desktop search application: It allows you to search the contents of files on your computer. — You can think of it as Google for your local files. The application runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and is made available under the Eclipse Public License.”
if you run it at start-up it continually updates its indexes [which you define] and if not, it keeps note of which files are deleted or changed, in the background and updates its indexes when you start it up.
Works for me.

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