How SeekFast started

SeekFast was created out of a real need in our own work. As software developers, we often had to find specific text in large collections of documents, source code files, and project folders. The tools available at the time were either too slow, too limited, or inconvenient for everyday use, so we decided to build our own. SeekFast was first released in 2008.

From internal tool to global product

Over time, SeekFast grew from an internal tool into a product used worldwide. Today, it is used by more than 200,000 users, including over 4,500 customers with paid licenses, in more than 100 countries. It supports more than 120 file formats and is used by individual users, companies, universities, and public institutions.

What we wanted to achieve

From the beginning, we wanted SeekFast to solve several practical problems at once:

• Search through many files at once instead of opening documents one by one.
• Show the most relevant results first, not just any matching files.
• Display the matching sentence and a larger text preview before opening the file.
• Work with a wide range of real-world file types used in offices, research, engineering, software development, and everyday business work.

That is why we built SeekFast around relevance-based search. Instead of only finding exact matches, it analyzes the relationship between the search words and ranks the most relevant results first - similar to a web search engine. It can search word combinations even across nearby sentences, which makes it much more useful in real document collections than a simple file search.

As the product evolved, we added support for Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, WordPerfect, email files, ebooks, audio and video formats, image formats, source code files, and many other text-based file types. We also added practical features such as CSV import and export, instant reloading of previously searched folders, quick preview of results, and two search modes - SeekFast’s own search engine for the best ranking and context, and Windows index mode for very fast searching across large indexed locations.

Expansion to other platforms

In 2021, we released a Mac version of SeekFast, bringing the same core idea of fast and intelligent document search to macOS users. We are also working on versions for Linux, Android, and iOS.

Built for practical everyday work

One of the core ideas behind SeekFast is that it should stay practical for everyday work. In its own search mode, it does not use background indexing, so users can search live content without adding constant background load to the computer. This has made SeekFast especially useful for people who work with large numbers of files and need up-to-date results.

Today, SeekFast is used by managers, office professionals, lawyers, doctors, writers, university lecturers and students, engineers, programmers, system administrators, and many others who need to search through large collections of files quickly and accurately. We continue to improve it based on real user feedback and the same practical needs that led us to create it in the first place.