15-Minute Reviews :: Gaviri PocketSearch Network Edition v2.1.0b1416

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Gaviri PocketSearch version 2.1.0 build 1416 by Gavin Technologies – A desktop search engine for your desktop and handheld

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Gaviri PocketSearch is the universal search engine for all your desktop, mobile and network needs. Find files, email, pictures, songs and other documents on any of the many devices, laptops, desktops and home network drives you use. Gaviri PocketSearch runs on flash drives, SD cards, digital cameras and on many other portable devices.”

Quick Pros

• Interface is laid out pretty well
• Indexing is very fast, as is searching
• Indexing is fairly powerful – Indexes a good amount of information
• Plenty of search functionality
• Built-in previewer a nice feature
• Support for USB drives (Including U3) and Windows Mobile available

Quick Cons

• Installing license with ‘Select Files’ dialog re-opening difficult
• May not want full scan at default with monitoring functionality
• Does not index ‘Network Neighborhood’ files, only drive-mounted network shares
• Files are categorized by extension, not by actual content
• ‘Upgrade’ to Professional version menu option confusing
• Gaviri’s website confusing at points

Expansion

Launching this application for the first time, you are greeted by a nicely laid-out interface, with an dialog box for choosing what you’d like to index popping up shortly after (See below for issue with installing license key). Choosing what you’d like to index is pretty straightforward; For most you will likely want to leave the default on however you may choose to exclude the Windows folder; You can also index email clients as well, which may be more handy for you. From here, you can also choose which portable devices you’d like to search (Any USB drive-style drives, including USB drive, hard drives, PSP and so forth) and which mapped network paths you’d like to search. On the second tab, Indexing Options, offers further settings pertaining to indexing, including CPU usage, rescan interval, filters and logging.

After I hit ‘Ok’ on that page, indexing fired up. It took a few moments for the indexing to initialize, but once it did, it went through very fast. While I left the CPU settings on ‘Normal’ which is supposed to have an estimated speed of 15-30 documents a second; On my test system with 5,456 documents it scanned, it took under a minute to scan and to flip over to monitoring mode. CPU usage itself wasn’t huge either during this time. As mentioned, the application flips into monitoring mode; The application watches the marked folders for any changes and re-indexes any changes almost immediately. Depending on if you leave this application open all the time, you may want to turn down the frequency of full scans with the monitoring functionality.

The information the indexer pulls in is detailed as well. It indexes ‘text’ files fully so that you can search the contents of Word, Excel and raw text files. The application can also index MP3 tags, the contents of archives, your emails and more. Searching has a lot of features, what you’d expect from a desktop seach, but does lack some including searching by creation date, attributes and so forth, but all-in-all does cover most usage. Searching appears quicker than Windows built-in search, even with its index running, from my experience.

There is a lot of other functionality that is in this application. The built-in previewer supports a lot of formats and allows you to preview images, movies, music, text files and much more so that you’re not launching multiple applications. There is also support for USB drives, including U3, Ceedo and PowerToGo drive, but is not limited to these; Anything that mounts as a drive can be used here. There is also support for running this on a Windows Mobile unit; There is mention of a *NIX and Mac version as well, but does not appear to be available as a download at all.

As mentioned above, registration was a bit awkward for the first few seconds. When you launch the application for the first time and attempt to cancel out of the ‘Select Files To Index’ dialog to go and register, after a few seconds the dialog pops back up on its own and does it until you hit okay. This is a bit intrusive for my likings and makes getting the license key installed a bit challenging if you don’t select your indexing options already.

While this application appears to support network scanning, you can not scan your Network Neighborhood layout nor choose directories through your network browser; It appears that you can only scan network locations mapped to a drive letter; A bit awkward, especially if you’re on a larger network, or worse yet don’t have access to map network locations to drive letters. This does need to be improved on in my opinion.

One small downfall of the scanning is it appears to categorize your files based on file extension and not actual content. I ended up with a system file (cmos.ram) in both my playlists and music categories, clearly incorrect. There are other instances of this as well around the application, especially if you let it index the Windows folder.

I also had a few confusion issues as well. While this is noted to be the ‘Network’ version in the title and in the about box once licenced, in the Help menu there is an option that says ‘Upgrade to Gaviri PocketSearch Professional Edition’ – This I assumed was a higher version than this application. However, this proved to be incorrect when I went through this link and saw that pro was $10 cheaper than network. This confusion was compounded by the apparent lack of any comparison between both titles; While I assume that Network is just Professional with network support, there is nothing I can see on their site stating such. When I did land on their page, confusion did build further. As mentioned above, their site mentions there are Mac and *NIX versions included with the license, but when you go to download a copy of these two, there is only the Windows, USB and Windows Mobile versions, and no comments I can find on their site of an availability time. I feel like there is a communication issue here in my opinion.

Final Verdict

While I didn’t touch on some of the other capabilities of this title (Check out Their blog for more goodies too), I still feel there is some weakness in this application. As mentioned, the website has some confusing matters, as does the application with the upgrade menu option. As for getting this application for free; It isn’t a bad title and may suit many people’s needs. The indexing was very fast and the monitoring kept things up to date. As for paying for this title; The posted price on Giveaway of the Day is $39.95 which is actually the price for Professional; Network is actually $10 more at $49.95, though with how the network functionality works, I’d likely stick to Professional anyways unless I could find out if Network did have more functionality added besides just network functionality. As for paying $49.95 for this application, I doubt I could bring myself to paying for this; With alternatives such as Google Desktop, this may not pose enough of an improvement to be worth it; If the Mac and *NIX versions were available, then I would definitely thing the cross-platform support as well as the portable support would be worth it, but at this point I do not feel it has enough bang for the buck.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, August 07, 2007