Have you ever wanted to find a post you read weeks or months before but, for the life of you, just could not find it? I *used* to have this problem all the time.
Some time ago I installed the Google Desktop search engine. One of the many things it does is it indexes every web page you browse to and provides you with a local search web page that allows you to search your computer. This means that it "remembers" every JWD page I look at, and in turn gives me the ability to search these pages with the intelligence of the Google search engine. So far I've used it to find many "lost" posts that I never would have found.
Several months ago I tried Desktop thinking that it would help me index my daily journals. These are in Microsoft Word and I begin a new journal each January. At the end of each year they are approx. 1/2 mb in size. I've completed nearly five journals.
Then I played around, searching for known strings. It worked -- up to a point. It found strings early in the documents but not toward the end. How deep? After trial and error I found that you cannot find strings that are deeper than some 100kb. That's only the front 1/5 of each journal.
I don't think it's completely relevant to this thread but I thought I'd throw it in the mix.
After trial and error I found that you cannot find strings that are deeper than some 100kb.
That's very interesting! I had no idea.
In the end, though, Google Desktop is very handy (security concerns aside). The latest version does offer encryption of the indexing data... however there is a performance price.
In the end, I still find it very usefull for all of my local computer searching. I can find old emails, old Word documents and many other things that woudl otherwise go lost.
