“There was a time when finding the right content was simply a
matter of retrieving the right floppy disk from the shoebox. Those
days are long gone. Now the average desktop computer contains
hundreds of gigs, and in some cases terabytes, of data! So much
information is interrelated that a simple hierarchical arrangement
of folders and files may no longer be sufficient to find what you
need. You need a tool that can intelligently index your files and
help you locate them in the right context. Google and others have
created commercial desktop search engines. However, there are open
source alternatives.“I’ll look at two open-source desktop search engines, imgSeek
and Terrier, which are handy tools when I search image files and
XML documents that contain text and references to images. I can use
a rough sketch or import an image to query similar images from a
bucket of hundreds of disparate images — almost like finding
a needle or two in a haystack of images. The search results can
bring up duplicate images, each with a different file name. In
addition to query by content, I can look for images by metadata
keywords, such as filename, description, and creation date.”