Search index tool for personal knowledge base files

Question

I have a large number of basic text, rtf, html, pdf and chm files that I store on a USB key as a personal knowledge base.

Up until now, to retrieve information, I've used a standard file searching tools (windows search,grep etc). However these days a brute force search can take minutes due to sheer data size. Also PDF and CHM are also more difficult to search.

Therefore I'm looking for a text indexing tool that will work well in this situation. I want to avoid a dependency on an RDBMS (ie SQL Server, MySQL) as I would be using it on many different computers and do not want installation hassles. A portable tool would be ideal. On some machines I will also often be without internet access.

Something that provides a simple GUI allowing query input and quick access to results would be great.

I've thought about writing this myself, however it's a bit more work then I have time for right now.

Answer 1

Google Desktop does this indexing for you, as does the Windows Desktop Search (in Windows). Beagle is a great Linux search tool.

Cheers,
Eric

Answer 2

If you fancy a bit of a tinker, I'd use Lucene - either the pure java version or grab a copy of lucene.net. This is a full text indexer and search library , would be perfect for running off the usb.