I guess it’s a sign of the times when you talk about ‘googling’ rather than ‘searching’, but…

I’m very organised in how I keep my own documents on my PC so I don’t lose nor forget where something is. But part of the research thing is a growing collection of documents that simply can’t be so easily organised because any one file could legitimately in multiple categories. The major problem are the academic papers, typically PDFs, which I want to search for specific words and phrases in the same way I use google to search the web. While my own bibliography manager can search on it’s own fields it doesn’t (yet) search inside the PDFs. What’s needed is a desktop search engine.

Note we are not talking about some Windows file search thing but a proper search engine with indexes and all - google on your own machine. The latest Ubuntu desktops include an engine out the box but until I upgrade I need a simple solution. Recoll is available in the Ubuntu 10.04 repository and seems to work great. I’ve set it to just index my PDFs and I can now happily text search them. Now all I’ve got to do is write an extension to Jabref to improve the inbuilt search to use Recoll [adds to very long todo and wishlist]