Offline Search?

[Tom Buskey]

On Thu, Jun 5, 2008 at 12:16 AM, Brian Chabot <brian at datasquire.net> wrote:

> Does anyone know of a decent offline, cross-platform search engine?
>
> What I'm looking for is something like Google Desktop
> http://desktop.google.com
>
> ...but for offline use.


Google Desktop has an option to coordinate with online Google, but it does
its stuff offline if you want.  Are you sure it won't work?


> What I want to be able to do is dump a whole bunch of files into a
> directory (or sub-directories) and have an application that can search
> them for keywords, strings, etc. This means it would need to understand
> PDFs, DOCs, OpenOffice formatted docs, text, html, etc.  The idea is to
> put it all on an external drive and be able to plug it in to any modern
> system (Linux, Windblows, Mac) and find what I'm looking for.


You want it on portable media?  I'd look to Portable Apps to see if Google
does that.


So either Java or a ported application would work great. (I can't
> believe I'm actually advocating Java...) Even Perl would work, as it's
> available cross-platform.  Ideally it would be a stand-alone application
> not requiring any installation of libs, DLLs, etc.
>
> Anyone know of such a beast?


Here's a crazy idea if Google Desktop doesn't make the indexes cross
platform:

Put a VirtualBox VM on the external drive.  Run an OS w/ Google Desktop in
the VM to index the rest of the drive.  The have copes of VB for Windows,
Linux, Mac to run the VM.....
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