B
+Bob+
My experience is that Ransack doesn't index, and that it is slow.
That said, it frequently finds things that Vista Search missed. That's
gotta be worth something
I don't know about AR and pst files, sorry.
No, AR does not index. Neither does any other third party tool that I
am aware of or any previous version of Windows.
Indexing avoids having to do a sequential search through the data and
that makes the search faster. However, there are serious issues with
an indexing strategy in any application design - that is, the index
gets out of sync with the data. In addition, you have to spend CPU
cycles maintaining the index on a regular basis as data moves in and
out of the store, even after an initial build.
Index can speed up searches in a volume situation (e.g. Google's store
of web page content or Ebay's product) or in lower volume situations
where you might want to look inside the date store (searching in
Windows for content in files [slow] vs. for file names [fast]).
Vista adds another dimension to the search issues and only indexes
selected items in its store.
The advantage to a non-indexed search is that it is comprehensive. The
disadvantage is that it takes longer since it has to work
sequentially.
Since searching for content in files is something that most of us do
rarely, it hardly makes sense to index all the (Vista selected) files
on your hard drive. You spend so little time searching in the overall
scheme, it's not worth wasting the time (CPU/disk) to constantly index
every files you change or add to your system.
If you find that you are constantly searching for files, perhaps
Vista's scheme is better for you. If you go that route, you need to
keep in mind Vista's file type limitations and its inherent
inaccuracy. For me, accuracy is of utmost importance and I can find
other things to do for the minute it takes to search an entire drive -
and I can't tolerate the slowdowns in Vista on a daily basis.