10 Free File Indexing Software: Improve Your PC File Searches in 2025
Indexing software allows you to search files on your system faster by creating a database of file names and locations.
Windows built-in search feature has been around for years, but with tools like Everything and Locate32, you can optimize your file searches. Let’s explore some great free tools to get your indexing on track.
What are the best free indexing software to use in 2025?
Here’s a quick look at the best folder and file indexing tools. You can find more in-depth information below.
| Tool | Speed | File Type Support | Full-Text Search | Advanced Filtering | Wildcards/Regex | Portability | Setup Complexity | Free Version |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Locate32 | Fast | Basic | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Moderate | Yes |
| TheSearchMan | Very Fast | Basic | No | No | No | Yes | Simple | Yes |
| Everything | Very Fast | NTFS Only | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Simple | Yes |
| Hddb | Fast | Basic | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Moderate | Yes |
| MasterSeeker | Very Fast | Basic | No | No | Yes | No | Moderate | Yes |
| UltraSearch | Fast | Basic | No | Yes | Yes | No | Moderate | Yes |
| FileSearchy | Fast | Text-based | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Moderate | Yes |
| Recoll | Moderate | Wide | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Moderate | Yes |
| DocFetcher | Moderate | Wide | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Moderate | Yes |
| dtSearch | Very Fast | Wide | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Complex | No |
1. Locate32
Locate32 is a popular choice for fast file searching. Despite its official version dating back to 2011, a more recent update from 2014 is available via Sourceforge.
The program indexes your files and allows you to filter results by date, size, or even specific text within the file. You can also use wildcards and regular expressions to refine your searches.
2. TheSearchMan
TheSearchMan is a lightweight and simple tool, created by the same developer behind TheFolderSpy.
The software creates its indexing database only when you ask it to, offering a minimal setup with no configuration required. It’s great for users who prefer portability and simplicity.
3. Everything
Everything is one of the most well-known indexing programs, providing a feature-rich environment for advanced searches.
It indexes NTFS drives on the first run and continuously monitors for file system changes. It supports commands like boolean search, regex, and wildcards, making it suitable for both beginners and more advanced users.
4. Hddb File Search
Although Hddb was once a promising tool, the website has been inactive since 2015.
Despite this, the software itself is still very functional, supporting fast searches even in databases with millions of files.
It features flexible indexing options and advanced filtering capabilities, like size and date, that make it stand out.
5. MasterSeeker
MasterSeeker is known for its speed. The program indexes a massive number of files in seconds, making it ideal for those with large file collections.
However, it comes with a higher memory usage, which is something to consider if your system is limited on resources.
6. UltraSearch
From the makers of TreeSize, UltraSearch offers a solid indexing solution. It indexes drives quickly and provides basic filtering options like wildcards, file size, and dates.
However, it lacks more advanced features like filtering by file type, which you may find in some other tools.
7. FileSearchy
FileSearchy is a standout option for those who want both speed and the ability to search inside file contents.
It indexes only text-based files like PDFs and Word documents, making it ideal for users working with content-heavy files. It also offers advanced search features such as substring and regex se
8. Recoll
Recoll is an advanced tool that goes beyond file names and indexes the contents of your documents. Whether you’re working with PDFs, Word files, or even emails, Recoll is able to search through all file types and find specific content.
It also allows you to filter results by various metadata and supports compressed archives, making it an excellent option for users who need in-depth, full-text search capabilities.
The downside is that the indexing process can be slow for larger datasets, and the interface could feel a bit outdated to some.
9. DocFetcher
DocFetcher is a free and open-source search tool that lets you search within documents. It supports indexing for PDFs, Word files, and more.
It is portable, meaning you can take it with you on a USB drive to search files on any computer. However, it requires indexing before performing searches, and its interface can sometimes feel cluttered.
10. dtSearch
dtSearch is a powerful tool designed for professionals who need advanced search capabilities.
It excels in searching large databases and document repositories, making it a top choice for enterprise-level needs. dtSearch offers advanced Boolean and fuzzy search options, allowing users to refine search results precisely.
However, it comes with a higher price tag compared to other options and can be complex to set up, making it less ideal for beginners.
Final Note: There are other programs available that use indexing for searching which we don’t have in our list, and are worth checking out if the tools above don’t do exactly what you want. They include Wise JetSearch, NTFS Search, SwiftSearch, and Index Your Files.
While these indexing tools can significantly enhance your file search capabilities, it’s important to consider other aspects of system optimization.
For instance, knowing how to identify good or bad startup programs can help streamline your system’s performance and ensure that unnecessary apps aren’t slowing down your searches. Additionally, if you’re working in a shared network environment, it’s worth exploring how to search for and locate files across local area networks or shared folders.
Lastly, mastering keyboard shortcuts in Windows or Office can improve your overall productivity, letting you navigate both file searches and other tasks with ease.
And if you want to learn more about improving your file search capabilities, check out these useful resources:
- How to add tabs to Windows Explorer for better file navigation.
- Free portable file managers for quicker file operations.
Thanks… you are a life saver!!
Sorry, I know I’m replying to an old part of the blog.
I’m really in need for an indexing tool, that works well with external harddrives, not so much for the internal drives really.
I fear though, that the tools here might mix up my external ones with each other – as I usually only connect one or two at the time to the pc via the same one or two drive letters.
Just bought my eighth drive and my memory starts slipping on what’s where – nothing more annoying than hooking up the wrong drive to the pc.
I’ve been using text documents created with win cmd for directory indexing of crucial content folders, but that is becoming slow and ineffective.
So is there a good tool for indexing each drive, and afterwards browse the contents of all, when all are disconnected?
A tool that might help you is something that can index the contents of the drive to a file, such as an HTML file.
I am in a situation similar to you (several external drives being plugged/unplugged often) and find Snap2HTML a very useful tool.
You can find more info about that and similar tools here:
https://www.raymond.cc/blog/print-all-file-and-folder-contents-to-text-or-printer/
Has anyone ever thought about writing an index-based software with content duplicate search function?
The calculation of the hash necessary to determine if a file is identical to another is very long, but if all hashes were kept in a database and only the hashes of new added files were calculated, the search would be immediate.
I like Everything very much, but I always need to search files by content, recently I found a free tool, I’d like to share with you, it’s Anytxt searcher, which is the partner of the best file search tool Everything. You can have try.
Yeah Everything!
no other search beats Everything if it comes to searching for a file or folder. What I am missing is searching for text strings inside files, which would make this software unbeatable… Thats why I am using no.2 now…
My no.2 search tool, which searches inside files is Lookeen Free.
copernic will do exactly that .. search inside emails, pdf, excel, txt, etc etc etc and index the search .. i’ve used this app for about 10 years now and even upgraded from their free to paid version … well worth the $20 … now i dont have to remember where i stored or what the name is .. as long as i remember some of the word content .. voila..
Notepad++ is the best ;)
“Locate32” is another tool if you want to search any kind of files and folders (Doc,mp3, Psd etc) including .dlls and .exes.
I came across a great software a while ago that serves the same purpose(or may be even more). It’s called “Locate32”. I HIGHLY recommend it!
thankx,,, I have been using this software along time ago and it’s great…
It has shell integration too, you can configure it from the general tab when you go to options. You can also configure it to run from a hotkey. I use Ctrl + Alt + Shift + F to make sure it will not conlict with any windows shortcut. It would be awesome if you could find a way to re-route windows search hotkey key to run Everything!
@Gregg interesting what you say about Locate32. I don’t find it does any background scans at all. You need to update the database once before you use it, if you want the very very latest updates (which is not usually the case – as its an old file that you cannot find), and that takes about 3 minutes for me, over my 1.5TB of data. After that its done and i can search anything I want to.
Could you expand by what you mean when you say background resources being used up? I am guessing you are referring to the scheduled updating of databases, but I have that disabled other than when I manually initiate it.
To me those few minutes is well worth the search inside documents feature.
I guess a lot depends on how you use the search function and what you use it for.
I use it to find old files that I have forgotten about, but I know contains text like “the brown cow jumped over the moon” or some such…whereas if you only use search to find the very latest files…then I can see what you mean :)
Hi Raymond, I use Search Everything since several years.
Trips:
To install the service run Everything.exe with the -install_service command line option:
Everything.exe -install_service
To uninstall the service run Everything.exe with -uninstall_service
Everything.exe -uninstall_service
Now you can use S.Everything without a user logged :)
Have been using it for 2 years..pretty good..Never made me disappointed..I’d prefer this application too
Thank you Raymond – useful advice.
hey Rey,its good to read your articles i’ve learned a lot from u but here i like to suggest u a “Ultra Search” a good software to use for searching the local computer please do check and made us know about the software
The “Everything” search engine uses the NTFS disk system’s tables… its own method of keeping track of files. Once Everything initially reads those tables, and builds its database from them (which takes, literally, only seconds, even for very full multiple hard drives), then it’s ready to go.
As a file’s name, size, location, etc., changes, Everything’s database is also updated. Instantly.
There is, then, no background scanning. One of Everything’s most salient features — the reason why it’s so superior to ANY other file/folder search tool — is because it’s so resource economical. The “Everything” search tool completely eliminates the need for ALL other file/folder search tools. And I mean ALL of them.
Even Locate32, mentioned here and in the previous article by so many, does background searching/indexing, and so, therefore, uses infinitely more resources (and is slower) than the “Everything” search engine. And please bear in mind that I quite like Locate32, generally speaking.
However — and I mentioned this in comment to yesterday’s article — Everything does not search for text within files; and I’ve communicated with Everything’s author who said that if he added that feature to Everything, it would be no faster than something like Agent Ransack or File Locator Pro.
And the reason is because in order to find text within files, the search tool must actually find, open, scan/read, and then close every file it searches. There is a finite limit to how fast any software can do that.
Remember that when “Everything” builds its database, and keeps it up to date, it’s just mirroring the NTFS system’s own internal tables. So “Everything” is doing no whole-disk scanning. That’s why it’s so fast.
But if it also searched for text in files, then all bets would be off, and “Everything” would be no faster — at least during searches for text within files — than any other search tool which can search for text within files.
What makes both Agent Ransack (and its commercial big brother File Locator Pro) so remarkable is that its(their) author has made his search tools just about as fast at the task of searching for text strings within files as anything out there. However, he does not incorporate the “Everything” method for just plain file search; and both his text-within-a-file searches, and his just plain file searches, both scan the drive, file-by-file. Granted, his utilities do it about as fast as any — faster than most, in fact — but it’s still file-by-file.
That’s why, as I meant to convey (but probably should have been more direct about it) in my posting yesterday that in order to have the absolutely best combination of file tools on one’s machine, one needs to have BOTH the “Everything” search engine (strictly for file and folder searches), and also the “Agent Ransack” (if you want the freeware version), or the “File Locator Pro” (if you want the commercial version) utilities on one’s machine. One needs BOTH of them: One to search just for files/folders, and the other to search for text within files.
If one uses the “Everything” and “Agent Ransack” (or “File Locator Pro”) combination, one has all the file searching capability that one needs.
Locate32 is an absolutely EXCELLENT competitor. If all that were available out there were Locate32 and pretty much anything else (other than the killer “Everything” and “Agent Ransack” combination), then I’d choose Locate32 in a heartbeat. It’s better than Windows’s built-in search, or Google Desktop Search, or Copernic, etc. Locate32 is quite remarkable…
…but not better or faster than the killer “Everything” and “Agent Ransack” combination, wherein one uses “Everything” for file/folder searches, and “Agent Ransack” for searching for text within files. And one of the salient reasons why is because unlike as happens with Locate32, or Windows’s built-in search, or Copernic, or Google’s Desktop search, neither “Everything” nor “Agent Ransack” are sitting in the background, scanning and indexing whenever the system is either idle or experiencing low usage.
I’m telling you (who are reading this), trust me on this: The “Everything” and “Agent Ransack” combination has no rival… er… well… except for using the commercial “File Locator Pro” instead of “Agent Ransack.”
But there are other tools out there which are almost (but, seriously, not quite) as good as “Agent Ransack.”
NirSoft makes a thing called “SearchMyFiles” that’s actually quite credible. But it, too, scans the drive for files, folders, during the search, just like “Agent Ransack.” Still, it’s a nice little tool…
…and it especially appeals to people experienced with older versions of Windows because its interface is so much like the way Windows’s native search used to be back in NT (actually, Win2K) and older versions.
Locate32, along with “Agent Ransack,” also has that sort of older Windows native search interface, and so appeals to old-timers like me.
Other credible free ones include “File Seek” (and also “File Seeker”), XSearch, Ultra File Search, Insight Desktop Search, Find Any File, and others… SEVERAL others, in fact.
If one insists on using the kind of search tool that builds a database from its own scans, and more or less constantly scans and indexes (like Windows native search does, or like Google Desktop Search does, or like Copernic does), then I have to recommend Locate32. The average non-technical end-user might be a tiny bit confused by getting it installed and working properly, but it’s a fine, fine program of its type. Probably best-of-breed, all things considered.
But, trust me, all things considered, nothing — and I mean NOTHING — can ultimately beat the little, killer, freeware combination of “Everything” and “Agent Ransack” (or, if one’s willing to pay for a commercial product, then “File Locator Pro” instead of “Agent Ransack”).
And, no, by the way, I have NOTHING to do with any of these products (in other words, I’m not their author, and I don’t work for their authors). I’m just a tech consultant in his 50s who’s been doing this kind of work for pushing 35 years (and who bothers to keep-up with his craft as if he were a teenager, despite his age), and so who kinda’ knows what he’s talking about.
Hope that helps!
___________________________________
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com
Gregg,
What about DocFetcher?
Yes it has a monitoring daemon in the background to keep the index fresh, but this program provides instant results for both file names and file contents, correct?
-Marc
I’m new to your blog. I love the way you write articles and select topics to write. Even better thing is how you are monetizing this site ..
Hats Off and Keep Going..
thanks, worth having in my keep :)
You can define shortcut keys for Everything this way:
Tools -> Options-> General ->New Window Hotkey Modifier + New Window Hotkey Key
Very nice, we use everything to find everything…
yeah, everything is a great prog.
but i have deactivated the continous background indexing, because i hate it, when my harddrive goes “zip zip zip” all the time (im confident with the opinion that this will sometime kill my hdd ^^). (its a option in the options menu, i think).
so when i start everything to search for a file, it takes around ~ 20 for indexing my both hdds and files and afterwards displays instantly the files which match my search pattern. thats ok for me because i rarely have to search for one of my files but when i have to, i got the time to wait for completing the indexing :D
that’s better raymond, tnx
Very interesting, I’m going to give it a try.
Thanks for sharing, Ray!
Currently using locate32. It’s free as well. Will try everything as well..
Sounds like a great app. I currently use Google desktop which works fine for me. They sound quite similar.