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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."
Will Google's search application functions feature Clippy? Or that damned animated XP Dog?
...exactly what "local filesystem image search" will return.
Finally, a way to effectively search through my gigabytes of pr0n!
Click here for CNET version.
Hmmm.
Wonder whether they'll start serving me ads based on my hard drive contents...
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.
X1 seems to be the most popular one out there.
DiskMeta, they had this project in beta for a while, the Windows product went into relese just last week, the site says
DT Search, I remember their ads in bunch of computer magazines, although have never used them myself.
EFS, found it on download.com, supports MS Office and PDF as well as other formats.
Maybe that's why it's not "Find" anymore. "Find" was evidently too positive a term. Now you only have the ability to "Search".
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet.
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
It works a lot better when you enable indexing.
Or so I'm told. My personal experiences with allowing the Windows Indexing service to run in the background have been that it's more trouble than its worth. Yes, on the rare occasion that it's actually -not- indexing when I search, the search is blazingly fast (compared to a non-indexed search).
But if the index is currently being modified, then the Windows search feature can't use it. Period. So when you search, you get the text "Windows is currently building an index of the files on drive C:" and it falls back to the regular, non-indexed search. In addition, the indexer consumes massive amounts of RAM while indexing, so a search run when the index is being modified ends up being about two times slower than usual.
It also doesn't seem to be able to tell when the user is idle. No amount of tweaking seems to fix this, without leaving you with a days-old index. If the index is complete, but you've saved a file since it was completed, that file will not show up in the search at all. I've had it kick on while in the middle of working on something else so often that I finally just turned it off entirely and have resigned myself to slow(er) searches in Windows.
In the interest of fairness I will say that the search seems to work quite well when searching a remote server that is running the indexing service. But running it locally is just a pain.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
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
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.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
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.
Sigs are bad for your health.
find and grep are oders of magnitude slower than the inverted text index techniques that Google uses.
See Lucene for a good open source inverted text index search engine.
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
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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 ?
I wish a could beat the creator of google-watch.org and every person who ever linked to it with a gigantic clue stick.
First of all, the creator of google-watch.org has a really big axe to grind with Google.
Second, HTTP is a stateless protocol. If you want a user's preferences to to persist within a session you need to use cookies or attach a lot of state information to each GET/POST request. If you want the preferences to persist after you close and re-open your browser you have to have the user log in every time and store the prefs on the server or store the prefs on the client side in a cookie like Google does. This simple fact seems to fly right over the head of google-watch.org and their ridiculous cookie conspiracy theories.
But hey, we've been over this in every Google story since the anti-Google FUD crowd started coming out of the woodwork. Here's a thought: if you really need a tinfoil hat then disable cookies, don't use Orkut and sleep better at night. But please stop subjecting people to google-watch.org FUD.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.