X1 Desktop Search

By Jason E. Havens

Jason E. Havens is an attorney at Havens & Miller, which focuses on complex estate
and charitable gift planning, with offices in Florida and Louisiana.

X1 Desktop Search by X1 Technologies Inc. offers a powerful search tool to solo attorneys as well as small- to mid-sized and firms. After the company’s strategic alliance with Yahoo, almost anyone can use its power for free, since the Yahoo Desktop Search service is fully dependent on X1’s technology. However, to select which drives you would like to search and to customize the search tool to any degree, you must purchase the X1 Desktop Search because the trial version is limited to 15 days. X1 offers an Enterprise Edition that provides search capabilities for multiple networked users.

X1 Desktop Search generally works by indexing your files. When you direct X1 Desktop Search to perform a particular search, it searches its single index very efficiently, and in a matter of seconds, it returns the resulting files to you for review. This type of tool is valuable to law firms since they depend on electronic files and computers to deliver services to clients and constantly are in need of locating a particular electronic file.

Convenient Indexing

You can schedule when to have X1 Desktop Search index your files, which is very convenient. The indexing process resembles what online search engines do as they scour the Internet at off-peak times with so-called “search robots,” sometimes known as “search bots,” “crawlers” or “spiders.” These search robots retrieve large amounts of data, mostly represented by actual content or words on Web sites throughout the world, and bring all those words back to a large group of powerful computer servers. The servers then index those words. When you enter a search term, “Law Office Computing,” for example, through any major search engine, you receive your results within a fraction of a second because the search engine utilizes its latest index to provide rapid results.

File Formats

X1 Desktop Search indexes more than 200 file formats, including all types of generic text files, Microsoft Word files, Corel WordPerfect files, Portable Document Format files and numerous other file formats. A complete list of compatible file formats is available on the X1 Web site.

Built-In Preview

X1 Desktop Search provides a preview view for most of those compatible file types, which you can scroll through and explore. Therefore, you might not even need to launch the full application to determine whether you found the document you needed. This feature is available for the widely used file formats, such as Word and WordPerfect.

Control of Further Actions

X1 Desktop Search offers additional functions for files or e-mail messages you find in your search. For example, you can respond to, forward or print an e-mail message found in a search by right clicking the message in the search results window. You can do similar things with files. These features also are available as icons.

X Marks the Search

X1 Desktop Search is a powerful tool for any firm’s electronic arsenal. It provides nearly instant search capabilities of every file on an office’s server or hard drive. X1 brings the power of the Internet search concept to the local level, which is excellent news for lawyers who often search high and low for that elusive file or message.

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All Rights Reserved.

When you direct X1 Desktop Search to
perform a particular search, it searches its single index in a matter of seconds.