Recommendations for desktop search tool under Linux

[Nadav Har'El]

On Sun, Apr 05, 2009, Omer Zak wrote about "Re: Recommendations for desktop search tool under Linux":
> > - Linux command line tools like locate, grep, find, vi and probably a
> > few good other "dinosaurs" which I left out of the list. They do what
>...
> I use those "traditional" command line tools, too.
> 
> The problem is that they are very slow when I want to search significant
> parts of my PC's filesystem.  Therefore I need a search tool which I
> would expect to index the information for easier subsequent retrieval.
> See above for my not minding the space taken up by those index files.

The "traditional" command-line solution for that was glimpse (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLIMPSE), which created in advance relatively-
small indexes which help narrow down the search to matching files (or group
of files) which are then "grep"ed normally. This yielded an interesting
combination of very small indexes (a few percent of the original data size)
and acceptable search speeds (seconds, not minutes).

Glimpse is rather old by now (15 years old, actually...), but the ideas
behind it are still quite sound and interesting. Udi Manber, the person who
wrote Glimpse, later moved to Yahoo, and then moved to Amazon and finally
to Google (the black whole which apparently nobody leaves ;-)).

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |    Wednesday, Apr  8 2009, 14 Nisan 5769
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |"Did you sleep well?" "No, I made a
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |couple of mistakes."