Another note to self, as I can't get to my own system to put it in there, a cool GNOME file lookup system called Beagle has released version 0.4.
Beagle is a search tool that ransacks your personal information space to find whatever you're looking for.They have a wiki as well as some info for those of us using Gentoo.
Have you tried it out?
I've been using Google Desktop (http://desktop.google.com), it's pretty good... searches email, cached web pages, any documents/files on your computer (even perl modules!), etc. Currently searching 20,000 items.