Advanced Network Search Editor's Review

Advanced Network Search is a very useful Intranet search engine application.

Most of the people working on computers in a Local Area Network know how annoying is to search the entire LAN for a specific file or folder. Especially when there are many computers sharing a large quantity of files. Sometimes, using the Windows 'Search' feature for such a task seems to take forever.

After installing this program, you need to configure it: actually, if you leave the default settings, the program will work just fine. However, you need to pay attention to firewall permissions. When running, the program will place an icon in the system tray. In order to be able to search for data, you need to start the internal web service and the search engine. After doing this, you can search for data. The only thing is that I had to guess how to configure and run the program in order to be able to search for data. This happened because there is no 'Help' section or any users' guide available.

The program can be run in a Web browser window. After indexing the shared resources available on the LAN computers, the program allows you to search for generic or specific (folders, files, audio, video, images, etc.) results. The advanced search options include narrowing your search to a specific file size or by addition date. Exclusions are also allowed. Of course, you can browse the shared resources using the same Web interface.

In order to search fo a file or folder, simply type in your browser 'http://localhost/cgi-bin/netsearch.exe', ( where 'localhost' = IP of the computer running the application), type in your search query, choose your options, and the application will scan the entire LAN for the desired file or folder.

Pluses: Refined searches for a files or folders are very easy and results come up in no time.

Drawbacks / flaws: You can't search for files using wildcards. You can't choose the number of results per page, so that you can get an extremely long results page in case your search is not specific. You have no control over the crawler; basically, you haven't got a clue when was the last file indexing date. A log would have been nice. No 'Help' section.

In conclusion: A very good program, but I some extra features would be quite appreciated.

version reviewed: 2.5.2.0