I've spent a good deal of time with the major desktop search applications, and although the power and flexibility of Windows Desktop Search is apparent, one main shortcoming with WDS has me continuing to use personally, and recommending to my clients, Copernic Desktop Search.

And that's the document preview.

If WDS had a preview more like Copernic's, I'd switch in a second. Copernic's preview is both much faster to preview documents (although not quite as WYSIWYG in some circumstances) but also has the invaluable feature of highlighting (and automatically going to) occurrences of your search terms in the document. Contrast the way WDS and CDS preview a text document. WDS just displays it, and often incorrectly formatted if the extension isn't TXT. CDS displays the text, correctly, highlighting all occurrences of the search terms (different colors for each term), and scrolled to the first hit. In the upper-right corner of the preview, it has buttons for the search terms you can click to go to the next hit of that term. WDS has no such capability. You have to load up each document in an external program and search for your terms to see why the doc is in the results list.

Copernic also provides the functionality for other document types. In previewing PDF files, WDS uses the Adobe plugin which provides search funcionality, but you have to retype the search term into the plugin yourself.

This is something that is sorely needed in WDS... A search that helps us find not just the files that contain the information, but helps us find the information itself. Previewing a lengthy text, pdf, chm, or html document is of little value if you can't easily find the information in it you're looking for, and that's what Copernic does, despite its other shortcomings.