CTM Development has updated its high performance document retrieval and indexing utility. Currently at version 2.0, it is the first time the software makes it on Mac, making good friends with other CTM FoxTrot-based products, such as PowerMail.

FoxTrot Professional Search is touted as "the fastest, most focused and precise way to find data in the files on your Mac." Searches are performed on full words by default, but they can also be made to include words "beginning with" given characters, all words in a search string, at least one of the words, an exact phrase, a portion of a sentence or any term except certain words. Complex search patterns combining several criteria can also be used.

FoxTrot Professional Search is based on the company's proprietary engine which is said to be used in more than 40 countries by users of CTM's PowerMail who rely on document retrieval and indexing to their most important files.

Mac OS X 10.3 and 10.2 users "gain a full-blown find-by-content solution," according to CTM while Mac OS X 10.4 users will benefit from an extended Spotlight search "in several ways," the developer assures.

FoxTrot lets you narrow the number of hits by clicking on several categories, in order to zero in on the documents you need to find. Results are dynamically generated based on the information and content of found files as it lets you successively tag hits by file type, age or parent folder. This advanced process is derived from scientific investigation techniques, CTM notes.

Mac OS X users should also look into CTM's PowerMail, now at version 5.6.5. The e-mail client is constructed around the same FoxTrot core search capabilities and it is said to be one of the best solutions for processing e-mail, spam filtering and managing mail archives.

A free, 30-day trial version of FoxTrot Professional Search for Mac is available, as well as a trial version for PowerMail, limited at the same amount of use time. Go ahead, try them both out.