Offline Search?

[Michael ODonnell]

Hmmm, your Windows requirement probably rules Glimpse out
unless Cygwin can somehow be used, but I'll mention it
anyway: Glimpse (and agrep, the Approximate grep) is a tool
that operates by pre-generating a database from a given file
repository and then allows fast searches using that database.
You can "grep" a goofy large set of files (100s of thousands)
in under a second after you've built the glimpseindex, which
IIRC doesn't take long.

I don't know the current status of that project since the
creator at some point decided to take it private and try to
turn it into a revenue stream:

   http://webglimpse.net/

...but the last publicly available source code kit worked very
well - I have a snapshot if you can't find it anywhere else.
I can't remember if stuff like PDF and DOC files would be a
problem but I think not.