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."

Comments

What operating systems does it work on?

[JessLeah]

I certainly hope this isn't a Windows-only thing.

Re:What operating systems does it work on?

[Afrosheen]

That's why 'slocate -u' should be in everyone's cron daily file.

Re:What operating systems does it work on?

[JabberWokky]

It's a lot easier to write a cross-platform website than it is to write cross-platform applications.

Having done quite a bit of both in the past several years, I'd highly disagree. There are plenty of off the shelf products or methods to create cross-platform applications and very very few (and generally poor in quality) tools or even documentation to write cross-platform websites (modern ones, with dhtml and heavy usage of DOM).

But a lot of the code (particularly for interacting with the file system and the GUI bits) will be platform-specific.

Nope, that's pretty much been standardized, assuming you're writing from scratch. Now porting an application written platform specific is a completely different story. But this example is an application written from scratch.

And as for filesystems, well... nowadays filesystems are much more consistant than, say, SysV versus VMS versus the dozen variants of CP/M. Subdirectories and pretty consistant meta information (date created, date modified, date accessed, etc) on every file is the accepted standard. They may do things different under the hood, but (at this time) they are all pretty much POSIX.

--
Evan

privacy

[Councilor Hart]

So, will I get ads based on my data?

Re:privacy

[Deitheres]

I don't foresee Google adding ads to a local search function... there are no ads on the Google toolbar, nor are there any ads on the Google Deskbar (save the ones that appear in the mini browser, but those are merely Google.com ads).

Google seems to be as anti-ad as most people on Slashdot. I personally hate ads, but I feel that most of Google's ads are non-invasive and in good taste.

I can't frickin' wait

[lukewarmfusion]

I recently searched several hundred thousand files on my work machine. It took nearly 90 minutes to complete the search. I expect Google will be able to significantly improve upon that. They're one of the few companies that I really trust to do the right thing.

Re:interesting

[Kircle]

[Google] going to reach a point where they stretch their resources too thin?

Google researchers are allotted 20% of their working time to do outside projects or to follow personal interests. Google News and Gmail were both results of work done during this "20%" time. So in short, no, I don't think Google has really stretched their resources any more so than before.

Google should distribute Mozilla

[The Lynxpro]

Since Microsoft considers Google a major competitor and has its target set on Google with Longhorn's capabilities, I think it would be a great idea if Google started distributing their own version of the Mozilla web browser. With Google's reputation, there would definitely be more people making the switch to Mozilla based browsers if Google were to do this. After all, Netscape is considered a failure now by the public and Mozilla to a casual observer lacks credibility no matter how great the product is.

Re:Google should distribute Mozilla

[Anonymous Coward]

They do, in a way.

Mozilla.org and firefox are the top 2 results if you search for web browser. Interestingly, the top links are: Mozilla, Firefox, Opera (twice), Safari, Netscape (twice), Galeon, evolt.org's legacy browser archive, and webstandards.org, in that order. The first page doesn't mention MSIE at all. MSIE is listed 5th on the 2nd page, after lynx, anybrowser.org, amaya, and Konqueror.

It seems people who talk about browsers don't like to mention MSIE.

Altavista did it 6 years ago

[Snork Asaurus]

Altavista put out a Windows search app based on their engine technology around 1998 (during their part-of-DEC, better-than-most-search-engines of the time phase). It indexed all documents and provided keyword searches that included Word docs, PDF's and more. It was free and a little buggy but showed promise. Then it just kind of disappeared.

Perhaps Google can fill this void in the pathetic Windows power tool-set ("Windows power tool-set" being close to an oxymoron).

But, despite my love for Google, in these more Orwellian times, I'm glad that I have the tools (not from MS) to monitor port activity.

Isn't it better just to be organized?

[blueZ3]

Call me crazy, but I actually just keep logically structured directories and make sure to save items into the appropriate location... It's much simpler to take 10 seconds to place a file in the appropriate directory at the start than to hunt for it later.

Even when a file crosses multiple logical groups, (picture, jpg, family, nephews, 2004) if my information categories are sensible, and I use a heirarchy that makes sense to me, I don't need search that often. In fact, I can't recall the last time I had to do a search of my drive to find a file. (I should probably mention that my work requires a lot of information mapping, so creating and maintaining such a structure is trivial for me)

Of course, since Windows search is so inefficient and (sometimes) problematic, I learned long ago not to rely on it.

bluez3