DocFetcher – Quickly Search Documents in Windows & Linux

Are you having a large collection of documents stored in your hard disk drive? Do you find Windows search slow in fetching what you want and want to be able to search faster in your documents for quick reference? Well, help is at hand, here is a free utility called DocFetcher that you can try. The application is a powerful open source desktop search application utility that is able to accelerate the searching capability especially on document files. It allows you to search the contents of documents on your computer. And as the developers have said, “you can think of it as Google for your local document repository”. The application is available for both Windows and Linux platform.

Once you download, install and launch DocFetcher, you will be presented a simple to use GUI. You are then required to index the folders where your files are stored before doing a quick search. To include a folder for index, right-click in the “Search Scope” panel and select “Create Index”, select the folders which you want DocFetcher to index. Alternatively, you can drag a folder and drop it on the “Search Scope” panel. Depending on your size of files, it may take a couple of minutes to complete indexing. The good thing is this indexing is only a one-time-process and when there are any changes to the files in the folders, they will be automatically indexed via a daemon that works in background.

docfetcher

You have the option to choose what to scan and can filter you scan to specific file formats such as Powerpoint, Visio, Word, Open Office, Rich Text, PDF, Scalable Vector Graphics and many more. During searching, you can specify the minimum and maximum file size (in kB) so that the search results can be narrowed down without giving you the list of unnecessary documents. DocFetcher is also able to highlight and preview the documents so that you can confirm if that is the document that you searched for before actually opening it, this is very useful when you have a whole lists of matched documents.

As told earlier in the article, DocFetcher is compatible with both Windows and Linux Operating Systems. DocFetcher needs Java Runtime Environment (JRE) environment with version 1.6.0 or higher for it to work correctly. You can download the Windows version from here and Linux version from here.

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