Recommendations for desktop search tool under Linux

[Omer Zak]

On Wed, 2009-04-08 at 11:52 +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> 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 ;-)).

Very interesting solution.
I do not care about index sizes, but I value very much a search tool,
which would be tolerant to misspellings.

The Web site at http://webglimpse.net/ has a link to partial Hebrew
translation.  They promise a free commercial license to people who
translate at least 5 pages into an as-yet unsupported language.

Is there any interest in an equivalent Free Software project?
I also wonder whether it is possible to use plugins of existing search
tools (such as Beagle) as front-ends for accessing non-"text/plain"
documents.
                               Happy Passover,
                                            --- Omer
-- 
Delay is the deadliest form of denial.    C. Northcote Parkinson
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