Rosie's Reviews

By Sandra Rosenzweig
     
I'm in love again.
      Unfortunately, there's no sex involved.
      But love is love, and these days the new version of Isys Desktop 8, made by Isys Search Software (www.isys-search.com) is keeping me warm. You may have gathered by now that Isys is, well, a search engine, one that blows all the free desktop searchers out of the water. For example, I'd never use Google Desktop to round up all relevant data for an MCLE article summarizing all the litigation spawned by Anna Nicole Smith. Isys, on the other hand, is a program to stake your professional life on.
      Isys not only finds more file formats than I knew were possible?including metadata for each file?it also handles many formats that belong to long-defunct programs. (This is extremely useful if you plan to search for any files that are more than two years old.) In addition, Isys effortlessly indexes all network drives you specify and provides several styles of querying in several foreign languages. It automatically categorizes and clusters the results into usable groups without much fuss on your part, and it sorts them according to your preferences for viewing the data. When you enter your query, you can turn on thesaurus searching and sounds-like options for a quick concept search. Finally, it's adjustable?scalable is the jargon word: There's an edition for every size firm, and a sole practitioner will make as much use of Isys as each of the thousand or so lawyers in a huge, global law firm.
      Now it's true that some of the freebie engines work pretty well and fairly quickly. In fact, Microsoft's Instant Search, which is built into Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Windows Vista, does a pretty good job of indexing and searching not only Outlook entries but also documents anywhere in your system. (I've mentioned this product before; until Microsoft bought it, it was an Outlook plugin called Lookout.)
      However, Isys's indexing function digs a lot deeper than any of the freebies, so it finds more files later on. It indexes not only the names of the files but every word inside each file, and then reports back with the number of words in a file and what they are. It sorts the hit list according to relevance (usually my favorite for accuracy), or by 14 other factors, including natural index order, file extension, and the first date appearing in the document. Highlight a hit and you see its preview as well as all people, locations, URLs, emails, and organizations linked to the query. Oh?and a list of the words in the file. A big time saver: You can save your queries to use again.
      I used Isys a few versions ago but found that it slowed up my system and was way too complicated for the average Rosie to use. Ah, but that was then; this is now. The latest Isys puts no notable stress on my computers' performance, even when it's indexing in the background. And, as far as complications go, Isys now provides a menu-assisted search box: Put in your first search term, then, in the next box, fill in an "and also" or "or" or "but not" or "within X words of" and several other parameters. Essentially, it creates a powerful Boolean search query, even if you don't know what Boolean searches are.
      A few months ago, I tried to find all files relating to previous owners of an apartment building in Oakland, but no matter what I tried I couldn't come up with the crucial document I wanted. Instant Search didn't work; neither did Google, nor the ten or so other search engines we have on our network. I finally remembered to upgrade my copy of Isys, and then waited a few hours while it indexed the content on several hard drives. When it had formed an index, I did a menu-assisted search. Isys returned a complete hit list, sorted for relevance, in one second?if it took that long. The first hit was the file nothing else could find.
      OK, Isys Desktop 8 is expensive ($1,000 for the first user, $100 for each additional user). But you gets what you pays for. If you search only once in a while and for recent email messages or documents, stick with the free Copernic Desktop Search (www.copernic.com). But if you need to put your hands on every file in your archives, or on every networked hard drive, do as I say (and do) and get Isys.
     

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