FWIW:
I used Foxtrot back in the day (pre-X and a bit post-X) and it worked well. But then something happened and it quit working as well and there was an upgrade policy that I thought was a bit, shall I say, odd. Haven't used FT in quite some time.

I've tried it again and can say that, IMO, both HoudahSpot and Leap outperform FT, both in terms of speed of searches and in number of results found.

So, for my money, HoudahSpot and Leap. Your results may be different.

This app is awesome. I was on deadline to submit a grant proposal and couldn't for the life of me find a document containing pertinent information. Fortunately for me, I had a trial version of FoxTrot Personal Search (FPS) still active, so I fired it up. Upon first starting the app you are given a choice which folder on your hard drive you want to index. The index building process takes several minutes depending on the number of records it has to process. The index created makes for very fast searches using key word(s). The FPS uses normal boolean logic and wildcards. Well, when I typed in the search box the phrase "united way" that I so desperately needed to find, bam, a list of records (rtf, doc, pdf, etc.) popped up with all occurrences found in the folder selected to index. A separate viewer below this list shows a preview of the record with the phrase "united way" in bold and highlighted. There's also another window on the side that allows you to further drill down. For example, there's a section with a slider you use to narrow the date range to search. A second section shows the location(s) where the records were found (folders and subfolders on your hard drive) and the number of items found containing the key word(s) or phrase. You can also see in a third section the file type found (e.g., pdf, word processor, plain text, mail message, etc.) with the total number found. Within a few seconds I found the phrase I was looking for in a mail message from a colleague. That made my day and allowed me to complete the proposal on time. I immediately and gladly bought a license. There's more power under the hood (in Preferences) where you can add additional folders to include in the index (like User/Library/Mail for email searches), but it's not a good idea to index the entire hard drive because that will increase the size of the index file and slow down searches. Moreover, you can exclude certain folders (like a Backup folder) which will reduce redundancy and speed up the search function. I'm thrilled and highly recommend FPS if you have thousands of documents and/or email messages you need to regularly search for arcane data that you couldn't possibly keep straight in your head.

The new FoxTrot Professional beta is promising, although at €99 it's pretty steeply priced. BUT... it can't index Mail.app emails. Just ignores them. And if you index them with FoxTrot 1.5 and then upgrade the index (automatically) to 2.0 beta, it's unable to preview them, which rather kills the point.

Hopefully this is a beta bug. If not, it obliterates FoxTrot, which would be a shame.

I'd have filed a bug reported, but their website -- perhaps the worst developer's site I've ever seen, so bad it makes me want to demolish the internet -- has no means of doing so. Perhaps they just don't want to know bad news. Perhaps it's some Swiss secrecy thing. Who knows?

The skinny: stick with 1.5 for the time being.

I have to say that I don't agree with Anon Bud at all.

I knew of FoxTrot for the first time in a user's forum of a different application (DEVONthink). Someone said it made an amazing job on searching files and contents, including metadata. (For instance, it finds pdf contents that are inside a DEVONthink database without it being open.) Since I don't like Spotlight capacities (or lack of them) I decided to give it a try.

Version 1.1 indeed made a fine job on searching (and indexing). Its capacities are great. However, it crashed from time to time. So, while on trial mode, I reported this to the developers. They were fast and very competent on their reply. More so for two weeks they asked me to try several builds and report the crash logs to them.

I got today a final build (already on 1.2) made specially for me. I'm thinking: "Wow! These people really care about users. Even when they are still trying their application."

It has not crashed so far. I'll give it some more use and if the great behaviour continues, I'll buy it. Then I'll make my review here.

I must say that on terms of support I can already give this application *5 stars.* I wish all developers would behave like them. :)

Well, the developer did respond about some erratic behavior I‘d been having. Things are working now.

I like that I can have a real time view into the docs I’ve searched and plug-ins from various apps really helps this (i.e. Mellel, VooDooPad, etc.)

I’m upgrading the rating a bit, but just hope that all bad behavior has stopped.....