Open Source Search Software

Power searching on your desktop without the pain. Perform powerful desktop searches without having to index your system using regular expressions. Graphical equivalent to find/grep. Available for Windows (JAVA) and Linux (Gnome & KDE) and easy to translate into your locale.

SystemTrayMenu is an open source 'Desktop Toolbar' or 'Start Menu' alternative. It offers a clear, personalized menu which can be controlled via keyboard, mouse or touchscreen. Files, links and folders are organized in several levels as dropdown menus. Various options like appearance, hotkey, autostart and behavior can be adjusted. It is written in C# and using .NET 7. SystemTrayMenu is portable, so it does not need to be installed. After downloading the zip file, unzip the folder, then start SystemTrayMenu.exe. After starting the application the first time you have to choose the root directory. In this directory you should put shortcuts, files and folders (App, Game, Script, URL, Network), which you are often using and especially when you can not find them over the windows start menu search. You can also consider to put there all files from your desktop. If you have ideas, questions or a problem you can contact the developer Markus Hofknecht via GitHub or email.

Blaze is an application launcher that distinguishes from amongst the others by being able to automate recurrent tasks performed in the file-system or even any application on Microsoft Windows.

Keybreeze Desktop lets you perform a variety of tasks from a hotkey-activated, command-line toolbar. Press a hotkey on your keyboard. Then type a few letters and press Enter to open programs and websites, search websites such as Google or Wikipedia, paste custom text into text fields, create sticky notes and set reminders, automate actions with macros, perform multiline calculations, keep windows on top of other windows, and more.

PyQFindReplace is a python based find and replace utility. It allows you to select files and folders. You can replace text in several thousands of files in one click. It has a pretty neat UI

This project aims to create an OS X and Windows XP desktop application that will extract relevant information from your computer as you perform everyday tasks such as reading emails or chatting on instant messenger clients.

A Python/Tk gui for find and grep. FindEmAll is, compared with other similar file search tools, fast and resource-efficient and independent from any desktop environment (no Gnome or KDE libraries required).

JIndex is a Java version of Beagle. It's a program that enables you to search meta data from files quick and painless.

Mustru is a desktop Q&A search engine based on Lucene. You can search local filesystems using natural language questions or boolean queries. A list of answers or hits will be returned. A web based interface is included.

Flexible tool which enables quick application/file launching and hard drive indexing. Based on Quicksilver for MacOS.

Recent Document Tracker Implements a similar function to Windows 7 Jumplists by tracking recent documents and folders, then by using document type icons in the taskbar tray you can pop-up a menu of recent documents sorted by last access time (like Jumplists) allowing you to quickly search for the files/folders you need. You can also pin/exclude documents as well indicate which documents are open is MS Office applications.

Power searching without the pain. Perform powerful desktop searches without having to index your system using regular expressions. Graphical equivalent to grep. Fork have new features like displaying context of files and "Open With" menu in Linux with KDE.

You might know tags as they are used in gmail, delicious.com or last.fm. They let you categorize your items in multiple ways. The files on your computer can be categorized in only one way, because you store them in a folder and that's it. It would be great if there was an easy way to store the same file in multiple folders at the same time, wouldn't it? Well, Tags allows you to do exactly that on the mac. Create new Tags by duplicating and renaming the Mother Tag. Drag your file or folder on top of a Tag icon to add it to that Tag. Double-click a Tag to view all items that you added to it. Remove items from a Tag by dragging them to the Trash. Or remove the Tag itself by dragging it to the Trash. Tags are just like folders in many ways; you can even tag Tags! The software works on Mac OS X 10.4 and all higher versions. Have a look at the screenshots to inspire you, and make sure to read the Readme that is included with the download, because it's really helpful.

Quicksilver-Clone for Windows: Application-Launcher with a twist (ControlPanel access, SearchEngines, Applications)

UltimateLauncher is an application and document launcher for windows systems.

Search for files and folder.

iMeMex is a dataspace management system. iMeMex is a research prototype. The package also provides several useful components for research such as external sorting, B+-trees, inverted indexes, content converters, query operators, and graph indexes.

A Java implementation of a desktop search engine based on Apache Lucene. It indexes HTML-, XML-, OpenOffice- (Writer, Calc, Impress), MS Word-, and PDF- documents as well as plain text files. For other, arbitrary file types the file name can be indexed.