In order to address the above issues we have developed Taxoner, a simple, parallelizable pipeline that allows one to align millions of reads against the full NT database of NCBI [15] on a standard personal computer or laptop. Bowtie2 carries out the alignment and the output includes the alignments and the taxa assigned. Unlike most metagenome analysis programs, Taxoner allows identification and functional overview of the genes that received hits. We are particularly concerned with the problem of detecting low abundance species in complex datasets. This includes detecting spurious bacterial pathogens in human or animal samples. In this task, Taxoner is approximately at least as accurate as, and at times even more accurate than BLAST + MEGAN and it requires considerably (two orders of magnitude) less CPU time.