Now that Google Desktop has landed on the scene, it would seem that searching through the files on your desktop is something new. But nothing could be further from the truth - searching has always been available in Windows, although very slow, and Blinkx, a program we looked at recently in the Beer Files, has offered file and email searching for months, and is a much more feature rich program than Google Desktop.

But now we've discovered that another of the Internet search pioneers, Copernic, has been working on desktop search for some time, and also have a program which is definitely better than Google desktop, and even has some features missing from Blinkx.

Copernic Desktop Search (CDS) http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/index.html looks and feels like a regular program, as opposed to the web interface presented by Google and the floating interface presented by Blinkx.

Once installed, it also indexes your PC to create a list that it can search through in lightning speed - less than a second. You can search email, attachments, Word, Excel, Powerpoint PDFs, music, picture and video formats. It also searches through your browser history, favourites and your Outlook contacts - making finding that email address or phone number stored in your Contacts much easier and faster than before. The CDS software gives you a preview of what's in the file you're looking at so you don't need to open it in the original software, saving even more time.

CDS adds new emails that you've received in Outlook to its index immediately, without slowing down your PC. When indexing other new files it uses 'Smart Indexing' technlogy to index only during idle time.

CDS also uses 'fault-tolerant' technology to ensure that your index can never be corrupted, forcing you to go through the indexing process all over again.

The Desktop search scene is really hotting up! Being able to search your own PC at lightning speed is so handy, you'll wonder why we never had it before. Give it a go, we're sure you'll be impressed! Alex Zaharov-Reutt