Desktop search

These tools are designed to find information on the user's PC, including web browser history, e-mail archives, text documents, sound files, images, and video.

[1][2][3] Desktop search emerged as a concern for large firms for two main reasons: untapped productivity and security.

According to analyst firm Gartner, up to 80% of some companies' data is locked up inside unstructured data — the information stored on a user's PC, the directories (folders) and files they've created on a network, documents stored in repositories such as corporate intranets and a multitude of other locations.

[4] Moreover, many companies have structured or unstructured information stored in older file formats to which they don't have ready access.

The sector attracted considerable attention in the late 2004 to early 2005 period from the struggle between Microsoft and Google.

[5][6][7] According to market analysts, both companies were attempting to leverage their monopolies (of web browsers and search engines, respectively) to strengthen their dominance.

Due to Google's complaint that users of Windows Vista cannot choose any competitor's desktop search program over the built-in one, an agreement was reached between US Justice Department and Microsoft that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 would enable users to choose between the built-in and other desktop search programs, and select which one is to be the default.

It was built in order to speed up manually searching for files on Personal Desktops and Corporate Computer Network.

[14] This made indexing large amounts of files require extremely powerful hardware and very long wait times.

Even only running while directly queried or while the computer was idled, indexing the entire hard drive still took hours.

Adding additional functions—such as internet access—to Sherlock was relatively simple, as this was done through plugins written as plain text files.

As files are added by the user, the index is constantly updated in the background using minimal CPU & RAM resources.

It provided the ability to index a wide range of desktop content, email, and use semantic web technologies (e.g. RDF) to annotate the database.

Performance improved (at least for queries) by switching the backend to a stripped-down version of the Virtuoso Open Source Edition, however indexing remained a common user complaint.