- Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly
- View web pages you've seen, even when you're not online
- Search as easily as you do on Google
Reviewed by Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly Network):
The Google Desktop is your own private little Google server. It sits in the background, slogging through your files and folders; indexing your incoming and outgoing email messages, listening in on your instant messenger chats, and browsing the Web right along with you. Just about anything you see and summarily forget, the Google Desktop sees and memorizes for you.
And it operates in real-time.
Beyond the initial sweep, that is. When you first install Google Desktop, it makes use of any idle time to meander your filesystem, email application, instant messages, and browser cache. Imbued with sense of politeness, the indexer shouldn't interfere at all with your use of your computer; it only springs into action when you step away, take a phonecall, or dose off for 30 seconds or more. Pick up the mouse or touch the keyboard and the Google Desktop scuttles off into the corner, waiting patiently for its next opportunity to look around.
Its initial inventory taken, the Google Desktop server sits back and waits for something of interest to come along. Send or receive an email message, strike up an AIM conversation with a friend, or get a start on that PowerPoint presentation and it'll be noticed and indexed within seconds.
Update:
- Jason Kottke: 'Could this be Google's portal play? If they've got info on all the files on my computer, why not display my latest calendar items, emails, online buddies, etc. right on Google's home page?'
- Search Engine Lowdown: 'After testing Google Desktop for a couple of days, it is clearly a tool that will become a normal part of many users everyday searching habits. The only thing that was of any concern to us was Google Desktop's ability to store documents in its cache long after you have deleted them from your hard drive. This should cause concern, especially for companies whose employees download the tool.'
- theunofficialmicrosoftweblog (Marc Orchant): 'I’m disappointed that Gmail is not supported in this first release; I’m even more disappointed that there is no image search, especially for Picasa users. The speed (so far - I’m still indexing) is just what you would expect from a Google search tool - which is to say instantaneous. You can combine desktop and web search results or keep them separate. The privacy policy is crystal clear.'
- John Battelle: 'I have not had a chance to play with this, as it is limited to Windows/IE, but that's OK, Danny has, and his very thorough write up is here (see below). What I'm interested in is what this all means for the big Chess Game That Is Search, and frankly, this is A Very Big Move on the part of Google. ... This is the part that's important: As far as the user is concerned, Google's Desktop Search seamlessly integrates your hard drive into Google.com. "Desktop" becomes another tab, right next to "Web", "Images", and the like (your data stays on your hard drive, of course, but to most mere mortals, it might seem like in fact it lives "out there on the web.")
- One, it means Google will have a major beachhead on users' computers - an index of *everything on your hard drive.* Yes, this raises privacy concerns, but Google has outlined their stance on this in the documentation, and (compared to Gmail) seems ready to handle this issue this time.
- Two, it means that index will be viewed *in the native Google interface* - for all intents and purposes, it treats your hard drive as an extension of the web (or, vice versa...it hardly matters which). MS Word, Powerpoint, Excel files? Just results in the Google interface. How's that for a lightweight OS?
- Three, it means that Google can build upon that knowledge of your personal data to make *all* search more relevant for you - this is Google's first major foray into truly personalized search.
- Four, it means that everything is now searchable: your email, your Word documents, your music, your IM sessions, and - pay attention here - your SEARCH HISTORY. That's right, the Google Desktop Search automatically hoovers out *every site you visit* from the IE logs and adds it to you overall searchable index as cached pages. "Take that, A9, Yahoo, and Ask," Google is saying. "We're playing here too...Oh, and by the way....we're Google."
- And Five, this provides Google a major new platform to build upon - a client application that integrates with the web. Can I imagine upgrades to that app that include spiffy new features like - oh - a lightweight word processor so you can take notes on your searching, or a calendar? Better yet, can I imagine Google opens this platform up to third party developers, to do what they do best? Yes, I sure can.
This is a major initiative for Google (they ain't rolling this one out quietly through Labs!), and it will be very, very important to the company that this be widely adopted by millions and millions of users (privately, Google employees have told me they were disappointed with the number of their Toolbar downloads over the years). If it is, it will set the stage for a very Web 2.0 battle for the hearts and minds of searching consumers - and that means all consumers - everywhere. In the end, if search becomes the interface for how we navigate our computing space, regardless of where that space is, there is no doubt the power of Microsoft will be diminished. On the other hand, there is no way Microsoft, which bought a desktop search company earlier this year, or Yahoo for that matter, will stand still. This move, I sense, is the true starting gun of a major race to win in search, and at the interface level for all of computing. It should be a fun few years!
- Danny Sullivan (Search Engine Watch): 'Overall, I love the tool. ... Having said this, and bearing in mind it's still a beta release, I've already got a wish list.
Most annoying so far is that you can only see 10 results at a time. Though the tool has a Desktop Preferences option, that doesn't yet include an option to increase the number of results seen at one time. Google said there's nothing to announce about potential changes to this yet.
Also missing is an advanced search page. On that, it would be nice to have drop down boxes as with Google itself letting you limit searches to particular file types, phrases or especially date ranges.
For example, getting back a long list of matching emails, then having to use the result page numbers at the bottom of the results list to browse to a particular date is a pain.
You can use some of Google's search syntax to get around this. To narrow to file type, use the filetype command. For example, this:
cars filetype:email
would bring back only email matches with the word cars mentioned. A list of known file types we've tested to date and found work are:
- Word: filetype:word or filetype:doc
- Excel: filetype:excel or filetype:xls
- PowerPoint: filetype:powerpoint or filetype:ppt
- Text: filetype:text or filetype:txt
- Email: filetype:email
- Chat: filetype:chat
- Web History/HTML Files: filetype:web or filetype:html
- Images: filetype:jpg or filetype:gif
- Acrobat: filetype:pdf
- Windows Media: filetype:wma or filetype:wmv
- MP3: filetype:mp3
For email, chat and web history, you can also narrow by clicking on the count numbers, as described above. As for images, Acrobat and other files, keep in mind that only text in the file names will be matched, not any meta data or actual text contained within the files.
Images, Acrobat, Windows Media and MP3 files are also not officially supported by the product as searchable content. While I did find it capturing some of this content on my computer, the bulk of it was not retrieved. Why some but not all of it was found is unclear, especially given that the index process appeared to have completed OK. But since this isn't even promised, I can't complain much.
Google, of course, purchased the Picasa photo indexing solution earlier this year. Perhaps it will be that Google Desktop Search will evolve some integration with that in the future.
Google Toolbar/Deskbar integration would be nice. At the moment, I can use the Google Toolbar to specifically search for just images, news, shopping, the web and so on. But desktop search isn't an option. Google says this may come for future versions.
A real personal wish is for indexing of content of compressed/zip files. I constantly zip up data -- right now, none of that gets indexed by the tool.
I desperately want the search memory features to mature. I want this tool -- or some other system -- to keep track of what I actually have searched for and track that in association with pages I've found. So far, Yahoo's implementation of these types of features are the best I've seen (but those at a9 and Ask Jeeves are great as well).
Finally, password protection and encryption of data compiled by Google Desktop is important. I hope that will be added soon. More on why that's important and other search privacy issues are covered in the companion to this article: A Closer Look At Privacy And Desktop Search.
- David Galbraith: 'Whatever Microsoft do, Google have shown the way forward, their desktop search makes your desktop just one more search tab. It brings your desktop to the web rather than the web to the desktop and this seems like a much more logical UI experience.'
- Doc Searls: 'cool, but Windows-only. So are Picasa and the Google Toolbar. I understand why, but the strategy ignores the big influencers who happen to be on a platform that's in a minority — but only with the masses. Does Google have any plans to make this stuff work with Linux and OS X desktops?'
- Erik Speckman: 'So, Google has finally released their desktop search product. I'd like to get excited about it, but I just can't. Dave Winer seems pretty excited about the fact that GDS is basically a web application in that the UI is exposed through a local webserver. This is cool, as Dave obseves, "You can use it with any browser. Right on." Very cool, except that there is basically no reason I'd want to use it with another browser. GDS only indexes history on IE, and only indexes e-mail in Outlook and Outlook Express. I don't use IE, and I don't use Outlook or Outlook express. That leaves the filesystem indexing feature, which frankly isn't that interesting. Most of the stuff of interest locally is either stuff in my e-mail, or stuff i've already seen on the web and Google won't touch that for people like me who use something other than the dominant browser and mailreader. Of course, it could be that some clever dev at Google had the presence of mind to index Firefox cache and Thunderbird's mail, and their marketing people just aren't mentioning it. It makes sense for Google to be focusing on the biggest market. Still, its dissapointing to see Google ignoring the people who are probably most likely to embrace cool new technology and evangelize it. Very very uncool.'
- Om Malik: 'Google unleashed the desktop beta on the world today. And as expected there is a huge furor around it. Since I am using Windows XP for a few days, I put it to test against Blinkx. My tests, admittedly very unscientific, show that Blinkx is a Mercedes compared to Google which is like a yugo. Having said that, I think this release has been rushed. Google needs to learn one thing: what works as a web interface doesn't necessarily work as a desktop UI. Secondly, if you are going to release something, don't rush it. Blinkx found music files, photos, and all sorts of things on this laptop. Google found limited stuff, mostly Microsoft mail and documents. Getting ready to uninstall already!'
- Dave Winer: 'The excitement about Google Desktop Search is giving way to the reality. Their choice of file formats they will index is weird. And I don't care what everyone else uses, most of my valuable content is in the CMS I use to edit my blog, and they don't index that, and I doubt if they ever will. An open architecture desktop search app is a requirement. I must be able to write a plug-in that teaches it how to index formats it doesn't understand.'
