Most Comprehensive (Free or Paid) Full-Text Indexing Tools for Windows and Linux Desktop

Question

Free is good, but I am willing to pay consumer prices (~$40) for a full-text search tool that does a thorough job with many filters.

When I say "full-text," I don't mean Everything or other filename search tools. I mean something that will examine the entire contents of a variety of text files (e.g., TXT, DOCX, XLSX, PDF).

For example, I might want to find all PDF files, on multiple drives, that were composed within the past two weeks, that contain the phrase "monkey see, monkey do," whose filenames contain "2021" and whose file sizes are at least 100Kb.

Copernic is, or at least used to be, an example of what I'm looking for. I bought a copy, some years ago, and for a while it was good. But then -- starting maybe with the transition to Windows 10 -- it turned flaky.

Note that I am looking for a tool that uses indexing. I want it to save an index of what it finds. That way, I won't have to wait five minutes (or an hour) for it to run a new search, every time I want to find something. The idea of the index is that the program will do that searching on its own time; it will have already found all word and phrase combinations before I ask. I don't mind if the index is huge, as long as it's fast.

I am interested in good suggestions for software that runs in either Windows or Linux. Cross-platform is ideal but not necessary. If you only know of a good tool for Windows, or for Linux, that's fine.

Answer 1

I've tested Recoll.

From the documentation :

Recoll is based on the very capable Xapian search engine library, for which it provides a powerful text extraction layer and a complete, yet easy to use, Qt graphical interface.

• Versions are available for Linux, MS Windows and Mac OS X.
• It can search most document formats. You may need external applications for text extraction.
• It can reach any storage place: files, archive members, email attachments, transparently handling decompression.
• One click will open the document inside a native editor or display an even quicker text preview.
• A WEB front-end with preview and download features can replace or supplement the GUI for remote use.
• The software is free on Linux, open source, and licensed under the GPL.

It is Pay what you want on Windows. You can test it on Linux first.

In the user manual you can find the following info about Real time indexing (Only available on Unix-like systems) : recollindex runs permanently as a daemon and uses a file system alteration monitor (e.g. inotify) to detect file changes. New or updated files are indexed at once. Monitoring a big file system tree can consume significant system resources.

Answer 2

Datashare (free/open source)

• https://datashare.icij.org/
• https://github.com/ICIJ/datashare

Datashare is a free open-source desktop application developed by non-profit International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

Datashare allows investigative journalists to:

access all their documents in one place locally on their computer while securing them from potential third-party interferences search pdfs, images, texts, spreadsheets, slides and any files, simultaneously automatically detect and filter by people, organizations and locations

The User Manual should show it matches requirements.

References

It is/was used to search through massive collections:

• the Panama Papers.
• The Paradise Papers
• The Implant files
• Etc

Extendible

It has an API and you can extend the source with your own plugins if needed.

Answer 3

I must say you got me intrigued. I've been using Everything for a lot of years now since Google Desktop Search has died, and Copernic always seemed a bit off.

With @Gounou's suggestion Recoll, I started going the AlternativeTo.Net rabbit-hole.

I got reacquainted with Agent Ransack (A.K.A FileLocator Lite and it's bigger brother Pro), but the free version doesn't have indexing included.

And most FOSS projects of this sort seem to be outdated.

There was one sliver of light, an open source project that is still maintained called AnyTXT Searcher

I've installed it for testing, and am still waiting on the indexing to complete, if this works this one looks like a winner.

Update

The project doesn't seem to be FOSS, its binaries are distributed via SourceForge.

Also, this, like Agent Ransack is a Windows only solution.