Everything vs Open Semantic Desktop Search

Everything is a Windows search engine for finding files and folders by filename. It indexes names rather than file contents and generally builds its database in a few seconds, then updates results in real time as file systems change. Search syntax includes Boolean operators, wildcards, file types, and location filters. The index can cover local, removable, and network locations. A content: function can search inside files, but content is not indexed, so those searches are slow. The maker says the name cache stays local and is not sent remotely; its support page describes the client as offline, without user data collection or telemetry. It reports that a fresh Windows 11 installation with about 250,000 files uses about 35 MB of RAM and less than 14 MB of disk space. An HTTP Server plug-in allows browser searches and file access, while ETP/FTP supports access from Everything or an FTP client. The HTTP server uses Basic authentication without TLS, and the maker advises against exposing it directly to the internet. NTFS indexing requires the Everything service or running as administrator. The freeware plan costs nothing; business and enterprise use requires a site license.

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.