DocFetcher vs Open Semantic Desktop Search

DocFetcher is a free, open-source desktop application for searching the contents of files stored on a computer. It presents selected results with a text preview and highlighted matches, and search results can be narrowed by file size, type and location. Its query syntax supports AND, OR and NOT, wildcards, phrase and fuzzy searches, proximity search and boosting. Supported content includes Microsoft Office files, Outlook PST, OpenOffice, PDF, EPUB, HTML, plain text, RTF, media metadata, Visio and SVG. It can search ZIP, 7z, RAR and tar archives, including archives nested inside other archives. Users create indexes for folders; the application detects changes while running, and a background daemon records changes while it is closed for processing at the next launch. Portable editions keep indexes and settings in the application folder and can be moved between computers. The maker says the application collects no private data and indexes nothing by default. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. The project is legacy software: no new features are planned, though bug fixes and support continue.

Open Semantic Desktop Search is free, open-source software for full-text and semantic search, text analytics and mining across large document sets. Its desktop edition comes as a virtual machine appliance for import into VirtualBox; configured shared folders point to documents, and indexing starts when the machine launches. Search supports wildcards, Boolean AND/OR/NOT and fuzzy matching. Multilingual semantic search uses a thesaurus to find synonyms, narrower terms and aliases, while stemming helps find other word forms. Interactive facets group metadata such as authors, organizations, people, dates, tags and document types. Previews can display PDFs, extracted text, table rows and images. Analysis tools include date charts, word clouds, word lists, network graphs and interactive maps. OCR can recognize text in images and scanned PDFs. Connectors include files, feeds, websites, SQL databases, MediaWiki and IMAP email. The desktop appliance is for a single user; a separate server installation is aimed at organizations and research teams. The multilingual virtual machine image is a 4 GB download, and the German desktop image is listed as coming soon.