If you work with documents, you need DocFetcher, an open source desktop search application for both Linux and Windows. Think of it as Google for your documents.

DocFetcher creates an index of your files so you can do keyword-based searches on their contents. That's not as trivial as it sounds. (If you've ever tried looking at the content of a PDF or DOC file in Notepad. you'll know what I mean!) Text isn't stored in plain text format, which can make external searches difficult. But that's okay because DocFetcher understands;

• Plain text
• AbiWord (abw, abw.gz, zabw)
• HTML (.htm, html)
• LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress (odt, ods, odg, odp)
• Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (chm)
• Microsoft Office (doc, xls, ppt)
• Microsoft Office 2007 (docx, xlsx, pptx)
• Microsoft Visio (vsd)
• Portable Document Format (pdf)
• Rich Text Format (rtf)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (svg)

What's more, once you've added a folder to be indexed, the index is automatically updated when files are added to or modified so it's always up to date.

What's the difference between DocFetcher and other indexers such as Google Desktop? For a start it indexes only the files and folders you specifcy, not your entire hard drive. And it doesn't index pictures, videos, emails, etc. It's documents only - and then only the type of documents you specify - making searches faster and more precise. Add it to your toolkit!