From my coauthor Scott Allen:In doing some research about desktop search for the chapter in our book about organizing your files and email, I came across HotBot Desktop, a tool so incredibly handy and powerful that it might make me be willing to switch back to Internet Explorer and give up Google as my favorite search engine. At least for now.
HotBot Desktop allows you to:
– Search the web
– Search your local computer (files, email, RSS, and browser history)
– Subscribe to RSS news feeds
– Block Pop-ups
– Perform site searches from any site on the Internet
While Microsoft, Google, Apple, AskJeeves, and others have announced something like this for later this year or early next, HotBot delivers NOW.
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As everyone who has ever misplaced their keys is well aware, the more different places you have to look for something, the longer it typically takes to find it. The typical computer user has useful documents filed in several places:
Email attachments While portals and other web-based tools are becoming increasingly popular, this is the most common means by which individuals exchange documents.
Contact notes Those who use contact management software a great deal will have extensive notes from their phone calls and meetings.
Browser bookmarks Most users’ bookmarks consist of a mix of frequently-visited content sites, web-based applications, and documents of interest for future reference.
Local file folders This is usually primarily self-created documents, and some occasional files saved from email attachments or the internet.
Knowledge workers, the several hundred million people worldwide who work with information all day, spend as much as 35% of their time searching for information, and are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less. By getting your electronic files well-organized and setting up the tools to search them quickly and effectively, you will …. dramatically increase your overall productivity.
