When comparing The Silver Searcher vs Recoll, 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 Recoll is ranked 3rd. 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 Finds text inside zip files
Pro Python language integration
Python extension for Python 2 and Python 3.
Pro Repositories and packaged binaries available
Can be easily installed through official repositories for popular distros, or alternatively it can also be built from source.
Cons
Con Flawed search
Two term search fails to find documents that contain the second term that are found by searching for the first of those terms.
Con Does not index all document types natively
Since it does not index all file types natively, it may need extensions and plugins to be able to find them.