When comparing The Silver Searcher vs GNU findutils, the Slant community recommends The Silver Searcher for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop search tools for Linux?” The Silver Searcher is ranked 2nd while GNU findutils is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose The Silver Searcher is:
The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Speed
The Silver Searcher is lightning fast.
Pro Idiot proof
"ag searchterm" - it's that simple in its purest form.
Pro Support VCS ignore files
Ag can speed up by ignoring files matched by pattern in ".agignore" (deprecated), ".ignore" (since ag-v0.33.0), and VCS ignore files (.gitignore, .git/info/exclude, .hgignore, svn:ignore).
Pro Good overview of results
Grouped by file, highlighted with background color, linenumbers by default
Pro Free and installed by default on most distros
Available out of the box on most linux distributions
Cons
Con No indexing and slow content search
Needs to be extended with commands like grep and becomes slow for large files or large numbers of files