Ever since I tried Google Desktop Search, there were a few competitions appeared in the market. Suddenly the market became so hot that no one can afford not joining the party. Google, Copernic, and Microsoft all announced their products. And I have tried them all.

Well, I have to say, they are quite similar. Not just the functionality they intend to provide, but the interface they provide. They all do well on what they supposed to provide: indexing and searching. I can find what I want among my collection of a few GB of e-books with all products. However, I did find one annoying point about Copernic Desktop Search. It nearly made my machine hang during indexing (even I set its priority to idle). That doesn’t make much sense to me so I drop this one from my list. Both of the other two products do not have this problem.

The downside of Google Desktop Search is that it does not support PDF file format (yet, at least). Well, I have a lot of e-books in PDF format. The MSN Deskbar Search included in MSN Toolbar Suite Beta does support PDF files (through Adobe’s IFilter Plugin). Besides that, the two products work almost the same to me.

I haven’t yet got a feeling of which one is better at searching since I didn’t really have done any complex search. Since I have both installed on my machine (indexing the same set of targets), eventually I will find out the answer. But currently they are all quite capable of doing the job well.