An objective comparison of desktop search and visualization tools

Information workers deal with many types of computer information on a daily basis including documents from office productivity application suites, web sites, emails and online calendar appointments. Indexing and search packages for these types of desktop information have recently become commercially available, but they are in their infancy. This short paper provides i) an objective comparison of the approaches used by existing desktop search packages for crawling, indexing and search, and benchmark these packages against a set of metrics and ii) evaluates the potential for different visualizations of the search result items and the relationships between them.