Desktop search engines - A state of the art comparison

During the last years prices for hard drive space declined constantly and by contrast the average size of storage media is increasing continuously. So users are able to store large amount of heterogeneous data on their personal computers. For an effective retrieval of this data a desktop search engine (DSE) is used more and more often. The paper presents first findings of a study in desktop search engines comparison. We use a multi-layer approach for creating a hierarchical set of criteria for the comparison within a specific test environment. This enables us to evaluate the performances for every tested desktop search engine in a controlled and rigor manner. Another result of this research is the set of evaluation criteria which can be used for future studies and evaluations of desktop search engines.