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.