Tracker: tool to tame your Beagle

Filed in archive Utilities on November 11, 2007

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece about Recoll, a Beagle alternative. I stated that I preferred Recoll over Beagle primarily because it is not a MONO application. I missed another one, named Tracker, another tool that is "designed to extract information and metadata about your personal data so that it can be searched easily and quickly." This one is written in C - hooray! Another non-Microsoft technology dependent tool!



Full desktop search is very helpful. I use Mac OS X's Spotlight as a search tool and an application launcher. However, Tracker seems to have more features, such as:

• Supports both free text search (like Beagle/Google) as well as structured searches using RDF Query.


• Responds in real time to filesystem changes, automaticaly keeping its metadata database up to date.


• Extracts file contents as plain text and indexes them.


• Can provide thumbnailing on the fly if a thumbnail does not currently exist.


• Uses multilingual word stemmers to help find more relevant results. For example a search for motorbikes (plural) will also return results relevant to motorbike (singular).

Now what are you waiting for? Go fetch^H^H^H^H^H get the tool. :D