The built-in Windows search functionality sucks. If you disagree, you're wrong. Every company that has any chance of becoming a player in the desktop search market is trying to get into the game. The big boys (AOL, MSN, ETC) are working on it, but most of us have been waiting for Google to step to the plate, point to the sky and put one out of the park. Instead, Google stepped to the plate and bunted.
Google desktop search is fine if you have never tried a 3rd party desktop search product. Otherwise, it's almost embarrassing. It doesn't search so many file types (nor even index their file names) that it is near useless unless you're simply looking for something to index your email and Word documents.
And the interface is terrible. It is a carbon copy of the Google interface. Google's web search interface is perfect. But the entire point to desktop search is that it isn't the web. Google's web interface on your desktop is just dumb. You can't sort, you only get 10 matches per page, why bother? It could be worse, though. If Google's desktop search indexed a useful amount of files, the interface would be much more cumbersome.
So I uninstalled Google's failed attempt at a desktop search product and resigned myself to using LookOut again. And then someone from Copernic posted a link to the CNET reviews of their product. It looked okay, so I installed and quickly saw that it solves almost every problem I have with Google Desktop Search and LookOut as well as added several very useful features I hadn't thought of.
Copernic indexes PDFs, it indexes filenames and folder names. It isn't stuck inside Outlook like LookOut but it has every LookOut feature I use (emails, attachments, speed) but with a GUI that is far easier to look at and more useful (and LookOut's interface is far better than Google's). It is not quite as fast as LookOut but it has a great interface that includes thumbnails and previews of files. The file viewer is a feature every search should have.
The best thing so far about Copernic is that it offers the option of adding text file types to index. So I added .cs, .aspx, .asp immediately just to test. It worked, of course, finding "selectedindex" in a .cs file on my desktop only seconds after adding that file extension to the list. Almost every file we developers deal with is a text file; this option should be part of the boilerplate featureset for a desktop search tool.
Desktop search is something that I thought was a non-issue. When every major company began acting like it was important, I reconsidered my stance. When I first installed LookOut, my eyes were open to the possibilities. Like many, I thought Google's entry into this market was going to be delivered by a chorus of angels. Instead, it seems that they rushed something to the market that isn't much of a competitor for the current offerings. Copernic, on the other hand, has a long list of great features and seems to be a well-planned solid offering that exploits the power of the desktop. It is so far ahead of LookOut and Google Desktop Search that, if I were one of the big boys, I would just call the game and try to buy them.