Replacements for AltaVista Discovery?

Daniel Ashton asks: "AltaVista Discovery was a wonderful tool for indexing files on one's own hard drive. I have most of O'Reilly's CD Bookshelves copied to my hard drive, along with other documentation in HTML or PDF format, and AltaVista Discovery indexes it all. Finding information on Perl syntax or Unix utilities or Java APIs is as easy as entering the keywords in Discovery's search toolbar. A web browser opens with a list of hits and summaries. Unfortunately, Discovery was both 1) single-platform and 2) discontinued. As I anticipate installing a new OS on my machine, I dread loosing this functionality. What alternatives exist? Are such tools available for Linux? For Win2K? Is there a file-format-reading toolkit that could be used to write a new indexer?"

something like this in GNOME 2 but the Apples have

[johnjones]

a indexing app called medusa was going to be in gnome 1.4 but leaked file descripters so was put back to 2.0

this does it so does MACOS-X has it built in infact so does MACOS-9

win2k does it but they have fudged the looking into files to only look inside MS format files so no PDF searching for you

basically I would recomend the apple Powerbook/(mac with LCD) if you are into docs and do lots of reading from the screen

linux is getting there and you can always just set up http dig or pay for a HTML serach util and interface through that after all that all you where doing before !

regards

john jones

Attempt number two-first was bugged to dif. Story

[JabberWokky]

.
Punching "fm:search local" into Konqueror gives the following seemingly relevant matches:

http://www.hendriklipka.de/java/ldse.html
http://www.arco.de/~kj/harvest/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/king
http://www.nostalgia.pl/

King looks interesting, but I'm not going to do the rest of your research for you. Lazy ass.

--
Evan

Let the Truth Set You Free

[gmhowell]

First of all, admit that you need a better pr0n archiver. Then we can talk...

Howto article

[Daddy Gravity]

David Mertz has an article Developing a full-text indexer in Python [ibm.com] which could help. You'll have to roll up your sleeves a bit, but python is as easy to work with as you're going to get in a programming language, and it has lots of libraries for various file formats.

Where Is It? utility for Windows

[zhamurai]

There is a useful app for Windows 2K I use on a regular basis called Where Is It? (http://www.whereisit-soft.com/). I primarily use it to catalog my CD-based media but also found it useful to index my 12Gbyte "research bank" of files on hard disk. It supports thumbnails and plug-ins. Check it out :-)

Hope this helps,

Andy

Just run your own web!

[sachachua]

Run a web server like Apache, organize all of your docs under it, and use a search engine to index and search it! =) It can be just for you, on your hard disk..

...

[rudib]

Just install Apache, put all of your docs into a subdir, then feed this to Mnogosearch [mnogosearch.ru] with some tweaked config files for PDF parsing. Ta-da!