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Google Experiments With Local Filesystem Search
Teoti writes "No, Puffin is not the next name of your favorite email client, but, according to the New York Times (NSA reg. req.), the project codename for a new Google search application coming directly into your desktop, that will let you search your local filesystem efficiently. This is different from, but complementary of, the Google DeskBar that already lets you search the Web. The article also gives a few words on the end of the stand alone browser in Longhorn."
FS searching has absolutely sucked until this. Find By Content from Apple was a step forward, but it never worked too well. Here's hoping this search will make it into OS X!
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
Wonder whether they'll start serving me ads based on my hard drive contents...
is it me or has google decided to go off on many different dirrections recently. I know they have been growing very strongly, but are they going to reach a point where they stretch their resources too thin?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
The company who puts a cookie on your computer that doesn't expire until 2038, has the ability to see lots of personal information about you, and who is interested in storing and indexing all of your email correspondance until the end of time, now wants to index my hard drive for me?
Call me paranoid, and mod me down because I'm sharing a negative opinion of Google, but I don't think I'm going to be giving this same company the ability to sift through my entire hard drive.
Then why would this system be useful at all? I mean, after all, Windows users could just use the file-hunting animated dog thing...
The Google folks are smart. Surely they've developed something that is more capable than merely find and grep, or file-hunting-dog, or Sherlock...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Google is a smart company. They're not going to go out of their way and spend resources on an Os that captures a whopping 1-5% of the desktop market. They're growing, profitable, and they make great products. Thus, they wouldn't make such a stupid business move. My guess is definitely: Windows only.
Why grep not working for ya?
Grep and find don't pre-index the files. So searching my machine takes me longer than searching the entire web. Google has indexing and caching down to a science. I can't wait for this to be on the market.
--
Lessons from Microsoft
(Warning: lack of cynicism ahead)
Seeing as they've built an empire on goodwill, a high-quality free search service, and word-of-mouth name recognition, I'm tempted to guess that their big benefit is continued goodwill and good karma from their userbase.
Yes, this is a novel concept in a business world where most companies look at customers and see numbers. Thing is, it's goodwill and a user-centric business plan have made Google the great company it is.
It could be that the 'catch' you're looking for is that Puffin will further solidify their already strong user relationship.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
They might be windows only, but there is a chance they'll decide to please the rest of us, too.
Per the article's comments about Longhorn and the "end of the browser" and how MS is planning to integrate network access with local services and applications to the point where a browser won't be necessary.:
Did I miss something? I thought Microsoft integerated the net with the local pc back in 1997 when they released IE4 and Windows 98 with desktop integration. Hrmmph... Go figure.
Ok, I'm being facetious.
Still, I'm not so certain this is a feature I want. In fact, until someone can demonstrate an example of why it would be useful, I'm certain I don't. I like having the local PC as a distinct domain separate from the net! I like that I have to open a program to access information that isn't stored locally! What am I missing about this -- is their focus group testing indicating that using a browser is just too confusing?
You know what's confusing? Windows HELP -- and not just how you use it, but THAT IT EVEN EXISTS AT ALL! My lusers come up to me all the time with questions that could easily be answered with good ole' F1.
What bothers me is that all of the work going on at Microsoft is pointed at new ways to annoy me. You want to make me a happyuser? Get your lousy freaking vendor partners to stop auto-running useless programs in my system tray; cancel ActiveX (*without* adding the TDMA crap I don't want) and get rid of the Windows registry. My main concern whenever I hear about these new thingamabobbers they're cooking ip is "Eeek! How hard is it going to be to turn *that* off? I sure hope R&D cancels it before Longhorn gets out of beta." I honestly think it's time they consider forking the project, or XP is my last version of Windows. Period.
There's just no joy in Windows anymore, you know what I mean?
Sincerely,
Eagerly awaiting Debian Sarge going stable in Ohio.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
From the article:
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
I don't like this idea. At all.
The main problem from my point of view has to do with ownership and control. Generally speaking, what's physically on my machine(s) is *mine*, that is subject to my total control (we'll leave aside intellectual property issues). I can add, change, delete, etc.
Still generally speaking, what's on some machine I access over the net is *not mine* in the sense that my control is reduced. Usually other people can do something with that information (again, add, change, delete) and if the machnine is taken offline, I have no access and no control at all.
As a simple example, consider a web page. In one case I make a local copy of it on my machine. In the other case I just have a bookmark. The difference in control is fairly obvious...
Now, what happens if we make users believe there's no difference between their local hard drive and Internet? That we drill into their heads that they are the same?
Well, you still have no control over information stored on the 'net. Thus, if you were trained to think that the local drive and the 'net are basically the same, then you would expect to have no control over information stored on your hard drive.
Note that by an amazing coincidence, that's also the goal of DRM -- that you have no control over information (that they call content) stored on your hard drive.
Also note that the flip side of the coin -- making your hard drive irrelevant by switching to a subscription service for everything, from OS to applications to content, is also a highly popular idea in Redmond and elsewhere.
So color me highly suspicious with regard to that idea...
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
If searching is such a critical a problem, why does MS keep making their local file search utility less and less useful? Windows 98 had it just right for me -- maybe move the "containing text" box to the front tab, but otherwise perfect. Win2K made it worse by making the "search subdirs", "hidden" and "system files" options non-sticky and hidden. WinXP?! Too much damn clicking, waiting and NON-DOINGSTUFF! Let's just say "thank heaven for TweakUI" or someone in Redmond would have gotten a VERY unpleasent letter and a flaming pile of dog poo from me.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Clearly, you don't use your computer that seriously. I have thousands of files, with many GB of data, accumulated over years, at home. At work, there is a ton of stuff to manage. And guess what? I sometimes have to find something in someone else's files, or they in mine, because the owner is busy. We don't all think alike, after all.
Let's see... then there's project data collections where lots of people are putting things. Employees leave. Some folks just aren't organized. Some people get sent lots of stuff they have to save but not read right then, but which eventually becomes important.
There are lots of reasons that make this a good idea. Yeah, I have homegrown solutions on Linux, but a good, fast tool on any platform is a good idea. We all use Linux at home, but there's no way my wife is going to use grep, find, etc. She hates computers. If she can click on a button, type a word or phrase and get a list, just like any web-based search engine, she'll use that. And I know quite a few folks like that - on every platform with more than a few thousand users.
This is one of the silliest notions I've ever heard. If they make no distinction between local files (in user's control) and files "on the internet" (beyond user's control), what kind of crap are we going to have to put up with when people start saying "hey, where's that document I was looking at yesterday?" because they never knew it was on someone else's hard drive and got erased.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Google will win this battle.
1. Microsoft doesn't understand that people LOVE Google. Nobody particularly LOVES Microsoft anymore. Product activation, high prices, and security flaws are causing too many headaches.
2. Google is more innovative. What has Microsoft innovated in the past few years? Their products keep changing their look, but what about user behavior? AD changed admin behavior, but how has IE or Word gotten easier to use? Google has all kinds of creative stuff in the pipe. The Google toolbar has not only changed the way many of my users search, but it prevents a lot of popup related spyware installations as well.
3. Google is clean. If I see that damn dog show up one more time I'll kill myself. When I search my file system I don't want to hide the stupid mutt, change my options so that subfolders are searched, then click through three screens to say I want to search my file system. Google will cut through this nonsense because they believe in simple/clean interfaces.
4. The technology Microsoft seeks doesn't exist. Nobody can create a search engine based on current technology that takes plain speech user input and magically transforms it into accurate search results. Everyone I've seen that's tried this has failed to an extent. You can't just try your best to fuzzy match and pass it off as good results.
"Never tell me the odds"
Google has a vested interest in trying to help diminish Microsoft's desktop market share. Doing so increases the relative market value of Google's products relative to Microsoft's products.
To help drive a wedge between Microsoft and their current desktop customers, Google will almost certainly port this kind of tool to other OSes. They would then get into various "enterprise" partnerships with IT solution providers to push pre-canned non-Windows desktops into corporate accounts. This product in particular would help to sell alternative desktops against Longhorn's alleged new filesystem features.
If this strategy were successful, Google would stand to pick up a good bit of revenue and mindshare at Microsoft's expense. My guess is definitely: Cross platform.
The windows indexing service always leaves me feeling like I somehow missed a critical page in the documentation which would make it work just the way I expect it to.
I can tell it's got a lot of power, and being a part of the OS, it's seamless.. but I just can't seem to make it useful to me.
Google would have a winner on it's hands if it would let me organize (and ensure I have a backup of) all the documents on the five computers in my house. I've got probably 6gb of family pictures, but no good way to organize them by where they were taken, who is in them, etc. I was in a full-blown panic when I accidentally wiped the only copy of that directory, and had to restore it from a DVD backup, copies given to relatives, sent mail, and so on. That's worth money to me, but it really needs to be transparent.
I don't think that's a good comparison. It's a lot easier to write a cross-platform website than it is to write cross-platform applications. Sure, some of the underlying code can be reused. But a lot of the code (particularly for interacting with the file system and the GUI bits) will be platform-specific.
Would people be willing to live with ads sprinkled throughout their search items ?
Right... like their toolbar and their deskbar? And Google Compute?
Has Google distributed something that you can install on your Linux or Mac OS computer? Ever?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
have a once-a-day cron job that runs updatedb, but then you'll just get anoyed at the way it causes your disks to churn for several minutes.
Any tool from google or microsoft or anyone else would need some functional equivalent to updatedb to run at regular intervals. The index has to be made some way or another. Maybe an updatedb type of process that runs whenever there are idle cpu cycles?
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.