Copernic Desktop Search 1.5, available now in public beta, is even more flexible than the previous version 1.2. It still supports Windows 98 and Me, unlike most of its competitors, and still comes in English, French, German, or Dutch. Now it indexes e-mail messages, attachments, and contacts for Mozilla Thunderbird and Eudora, as well as for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express. This version also increases both the number of supported file types and the ways in which you can add new file types. It raises the intelligence of its support for indexing network drives and adds a number of welcome enhancements to the user interface.

CDS indexes a wide variety of file types, including Office documents, PDFs, and HTML files, and has 20 new file extensions in this version. It indexes metadata for many types—for example, summary info for DOC files, tags for MP3 music files, and EXIF information for JPG images. It also indexes artist/title data for iTunes songs and metadata in QuickTime movies and OGG audio files. The new ability to use wildcards in user-defined file types makes it possible to index every file on disk by name and other standard Windows properties. Unfortunately it won't index the names or contents of files within ZIP or other archive file types. Under Windows XP or 2000, it indexes new or changed files immediately, and if you're using Outlook it indexes received and sent e-mails on the fly. You can separately schedule background indexing of files, e-mails, contacts, and favorites and history (IE, Mozilla, Firefox, or Netscape). And you can set it to suspend indexing while the computer is in use.

CDS can index network drives as well, and this version is smart enough to deal with times when the network is unavailable. You can search and find indexed network documents even when off-line, though of course you can't preview or open them. And when the network becomes available again CDS simply updates the index to reflect any changes that occurred.

CDS offers optional search-as-you-type—each letter narrows down the results to those that contain keywords beginning with what you've typed thus far. This search is similar to that of X1 (which powers Yahoo! Desktop Search), though not quite as fast, and you can choose whether it displays all items or none when the search box is empty. You can search on specific phrases and modify keywords with Boolean OR or NOT. Each search takes place within a specific content area such as Emails, Files, Contacts, Favorites, and History, but a new Other Search Results pane shows how many results are available in other areas and links directly to them. Each content area includes the option to refine your search using relevant data fields—for example, Subject in Emails or Artist in Music.

A preview pane displays the content of the selected item. For text-type items, keywords are highlighted with a set of colors that can be defined by the user. New in this version, the preview pane sports a button for each keyword—clicking the button or pressing a corresponding shortcut key lets you jump to the next instance of that keyword. We did find that the highlighting process in very large files bogged the program down. The preview pane displays a thumbnail of images with an optional filmstrip view and previews audio and video files using an embedded Windows Media Player. You can launch any found files directly and reply to or forward found e-mail messages.

CDS is an impressive desktop search tool, and this beta version makes it even better. We still prefer Yahoo! Desktop Search in general, but CDS is the very best choice for those with Windows 98 or Me and for those using Thunderbird or Eudora for e-mail.