Remember how Vista took 45 seconds to find three files? Well, folks, Agent Ransack needed only 11 seconds on the exact same computer to perform the same search. Check that: a better search. Because Agent Ransack found eight files, not three! It caught five files that Vista didn’t catch: GHOSTSCRIPT.DLL, LMHOSTS.SAM (two instances), and APPHOSTSVC.DLL (also two instances). So what’s going on here? Why didn’t Vista catch these other five files?
Well, I knew the answer already, but Joe the Computer User probably wouldn’t. (He lives near Joe the Plumber.) When you tell Vista to search for HOSTS, it only looks for files whose names begin with HOSTS. If you want to include files that contain the string anywhere in the filename, such as LMHOSTS.SAM, then you would need to perform the search using the term *HOSTS* instead of simply HOSTS. (By the way, that search on Vista took 55 seconds, exactly five times worse than Agent Ransack. Wow!)
I haven’t touched on Agent Ransack’s ability to search using regular expressions, because for most users, such an ability is secondary to its much more convenient user interface and impressive speed; however, if you are already conversant with regular expressions, this feature is an added benefit. One other thing you should consider is that Agent Ransack’s help system relies on the venerable WIndows Help engine (WINHLP32.EXE), which Microsoft apparently could not find room for in the Vista distribution (although apparently there is room for 32 different versions of MSHTML.DLL). You can download WINHLP32 via knowledge base article 917607, and it’s a good idea in case you have other older programs kicking around… which you’re likely to do when they are as useful as Agent Ransack.
Nice work, Mythic Software. Once again, the little guy outperforms the legion of Porsche-driving developers in Redmond, who really need to stop drinking their own Kool-Aid and start looking at why the largest software company in the world can be so totally embarrassed when it comes to an important feature like desktop search. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to buy a copy of FileLocator Pro ($29.95). I may or may not need whatever features it has beyond the freeware version, but I like the idea of sending a few bucks to people who’ve earned it. Next time, we’ll turn our attention back to Search Server 2008, which I’m actually starting to like.
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