News Story

Insanely great email/file search tool

Marc Eisenstadt, Tuesday 16 Sep 2003

Having run tools like &#39AltaVista Personal&#39 and &#39Enfish&#39 over the years, and always having wondered &#39why can I search a large chunk of the web faster than I can search my own machine&#39, I&#39ve finally discovered one (at www.x1.com) that &#39does the right thing&#39: it&#39s not merely that it indexes everything, but more that it displays incremental results in real time as you type (the set of hits grows & shrinks in real time as you modify the search terms. Ridiculously fast and useful – main download is free, license for advanced features (attachment search) is $40-ish;

*READ THE INSTALLATION LICENSE CAREFULLY BEFORE AUTOMATICALLY CLICKING &#39YES&#39*
(the small print would appear to open the door to 3rd party adverts, implying either &#39spyware&#39 or a spyware hook … though users of the full product say it&#39s fine — I run it at home and use my personal firewall to block it from accessing the internet anyway, and it works fine).

Frankly, it&#39s so good that (a) I simply don&#39t care about the license caveat and (b) it&#39s inspired me to write this ridiculous email that sounds like a typical spam advertisement!

-Marc