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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."
Wonder whether they'll start serving me ads based on my hard drive contents...
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
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.
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Lessons from Microsoft
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.
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.
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 ?