Mac users are used to having a fast, simple search of their entire machine with either a simple click of the Spotlight icon or a quick Mac shortcut. But nowadays people keep files all over the place, including online. Do you get sick of searching in multiple locations for your files?

If you’re a regular Internet user, you’ve probably got at least one webmail account and some sort of cloud data hosting somewhere, like Dropbox or Box. If you’re a big user of cloud services, you may in fact use several of these services and have multiple accounts for each service. Why not link them all together and search them at once from your Mac? You can now do this using Found.

Install Found for Mac

To install Found on your Mac you will need to be running Mac OSX 10.6.8 at least. You can download the Found application for free using the iTunes store. It’s only just recently come out of beta and become available to the public.

Link Multiple Accounts For Web Storage & Email

It doesn’t matter if you use Box, Dropbox, Gmail or Google Drive, nor does it matter if you have more than one account for each service. You can link any number of services to your Found search application and prepare yourself for lightning-fast searches across them all.

Found Search Privacy

All of the searches are conducted with your privacy in mind. Passwords are stored in your Mac’s keychain and the services you connect are searched directly. Your searches are kept private for your security.

Using Found Search

When you search for an item using Found, type in the minimum amount of text possible. Every keystroke will further refine your search. If you click on an item, it will open it in the service you see it listed under. If you click Command-Enter, you can open the folder containing the item, or in the case of Gmail, it will open the thread with the message in it.

While Found is running, you can launch the pallet for a search, or hide Found using the shortcut Control-Control (double-clicking the Control key). From there it behaves similarly to Spotlight, in that you see a list of files you can scroll through with the file type identifiable by an icon. However, you also see where the file is located, how many matches have been found across all services and how recently these files have been updated. Recent files will also show up higher on the list of search results.

Found will index all of your files locally, including a preview of each document which you will see when hovering over search results. This indexing is the key to why Found searches are so fast.

Moving Files With Found

Found can also help you to move files around easily. With Found, you can drag and drop files between your various storage services. There’s no need to log in to each service in order to download and re-upload the files. It’s all connected and made as simple as possible.

Offline Use Of Found Search

Since Found indexes all of your files, it ensures you can search and preview all of your documents from your Mac and cloud services even when you’re offline. Obviously though, your cloud services data will only be as up-to-date as your last online connection.

Alternative Web App: Otixo

The biggest competition for a tool like Found is a web service called Otixo, which connects all of your web storage, including FTP, to one online interface you can use to browse and search. However, Otixo doesn’t let you link email addresses, multiple accounts and it doesn’t let you link your Mac. MakeUseOf have previously written an article on Otixo if you want more information.

More Coming To Found

Found have said they plan to add more personal and enterprise storage services in the near future, including Evernote, which is a favourite of many people. If you have ideas about great features Found could add, then contact them and let them know. They do want to be the best!

What other services would you like to be able to search, from your Mac?

Image Credit: Found