I never had good luck with ObjectDock (it’s a resource hog) or Google Desktop Search. I like the desktop search capabilities, but I keep far to many files on my disk (mostly source code) so the indexing takes days to complete and the final index takes gigs of disk space.

One tool I’ve been using lately is Launchy. It’s an open-source app that indexes your program files menu. Hit alt-space and start typing in the name. It’ll display the closest hit it finds. Then just hit enter to run the app. It’s intelligent enough to learn what you use most often and suggest that after only a couple key strokes. It also has some basic search capabilities.

If anything one benefit for Launchy is that you get to start the right app quickly and no need for many desktop icons.

Incidentally, I just found the Internotes plugin for Firefox. It lets you “stick” post-it like notes on Web pages, so when you return to them you can have a little reminder of what you were doing or what you wanted to check up on… the possibilities are endless.

With recent trends - sorting and tagging are a bit old fashioned. People claim that a good search is all you need. Desktop searches will usually help you find what you’re looking for faster than anything else, both with files and e-mails. Sorting takes a lot of time, searching is instant.