Doodle is a tool to quickly search the documents on a computer. Doodle builds an index using meta-data contained in the documents and allows fast searches on the resulting database. Doodle uses libextractor to support obtaining meta-data from various file-formats. The database used by doodle is a suffix tree, resulting in fast lookups. Doodle supports approximate searches.

Features that Doodle does not have at the moment include:

• A web interface
• Ordering of search results
• Spidering (indexing the Internet or websites)
• If you need these features, have a look at the alternatives section.

Doodle is licensed under the GNU GPL. Indexing large volumes can take several hundred MBs of memory (depending on the amount of meta-data found). Searching should nevertheless require almost no memory. Using the latest version of libextractor is recommended.

[ http://www.gnunet.org/doodle/ ]

As with most other desktop-based sarch engine, you have to create a database upon installation. With doodle creating a database is as easy as typing this in the terminal: doodle -b /home/pavs

If you want to keep your doodle database up-to-date, you can either periodically re-run doodle with the -b option, or you can use doodled, the doodle daemon. doodled uses fam to notice whenever a file is changed and instantly updates the doodle database. In order to use doodled, you must have famd running. If famd is running, you can start doodled by passing the same arguments that you would pass to doodle to construct the database, but without the -b option: doodled

To search for something: doodle <searchstring>

There are some GTK frontend for doodle. catfish is one of them. [ http://software.twotoasts.de/?page=catfish ], you could also use KDoodle, a KDE frontend for doodle, [ http://www.c2root.be/kdoodle/ ]