regain

Overall Opinion: Regain works just like Google for web results, but for files and documents located on your personal computer. There are two versions of the software available for download. Regain Desktop Search will index all of the data on your computer to create a search index that is easily searchable upon request. Regain Server Search does the same thing, but with web servers. Regain uses the search syntax called Lucene to achieve its incredible results. It's the same syntax supported by Google so that you can include wildcards, boolean operators, grouping, phonetic search, and more. This customization allows you to find files quickly when you're aware of certain aspects of the data since you can narrow your search using these operators. If you have data on your computer that you would prefer not show up in a search index of the hard drives, you can specify content that should go in Regain's blacklist. The search spider that indexes content on your computer will not spider the contents of this folder. Conversely, if you only want to use Regain to index your work content and nothing else, you can use the whitelist feature to index that folder and everything else on the computer will be ignored. You can use the blacklist and whitelist features with the stopword list feature to further limit the amount of content that appears in your search index. The stopword list feature will immediately stop indexing a file when the specified word or phrase appears. Regain is entirely free to use and open source for both desktop and server use.

Pros: Available on most computing platforms Easily search through your documents in seconds Add new materials to your search index regularly Search engine syntax and modifiers supported White and blacklist for searching your files Stopword list prevents searching certain keywords Highly configurable using XML files Access rights management to prevent users seeing each other's files

Cons: No longer in active development