Non-NB: Any quasi-Orbis programs out there, on a student's budge t?

["Schlabach, Gerald W." <gwschlabach () stthomas ! edu>]

Hello folks:

Yes, I'm still here.  Since I'm not such an early adopter as I was in my
youth, I'm not using the 8.0 beta, so there's less to say these days.  (For
the record, I hit 50, a few months before Mervyn hit 70.)

I have a "non-NB" question.  If we were cultists, it might appear to be a
"betrayal of NB" question, but I really don't think it is.  

I'm teaching an upper-level course right now that has a strong research
component.  I'm trying to take about 10 minutes each week to introduce some
basic building-block research skills, techniques and strategies.  In a few
days I want to do one such session on electronic searching.  I find that few
students are using even the most basic tools -- like taking notes in a word
processor, which for undergraduate projects can all be in one file, and then
doing a very basic Ctrl-F searches.  

What I would like to is give them four or five alternatives -- from the most
basic sort of search I just described, to the Rolls Royce of textbase
management, our own Nota Bene.  Realistically, only a few graduate school
bound students are going to consider purchasing Nota Bene.  But if a few
more know that Nota Bene is out there, and start with intermediate software
tools, eventually a few of them might upgrade to Nota Bene.  This is why I
don't think I'm betraying NB by posing my question, which is...

Do any of you know of freeware, shareware, or less-than-$50 software
programs out there that do some of what Orbis does, indexing and searching
multiple files, probably in MS Word formats?  7-8 years ago I found a couple
of these when I was teaching another research seminar, but I am sure my
findings are now woefully out of date.  And if I can avoid re-doing not only
my own earlier investigation, but an investigation one of you might have
done, all the better. 

(BTW, to anticipate the answer some of you might have, the next-step-up
suggestion beyond simple Ctrl-F searching that I am going to offer will be
MSN and Google desktop searching.  So you don't have to remind me of that.
What I would like third-level options to offer is more targeted searching --
e.g. in specific folders, or with certain kinds of filenames.) 

Gerald W. Schlabach
Theology Department
University of St. Thomas
2115 Summit Avenue / JRC 153
St. Paul MN 55103
        651/962-5332
        gwschlabach@stthomas.edu