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Google Launches Desktop Search Tool
hanky writes "Google brings search to your very desktop with Google Desktop, a mini Google index of your own. Search your filesystem, Outlook or Outlook Express inbox, AIM instant message transcripts, and Internet Explorer cache. There's a full introduction to the Google Desktop over at the O'Reilly Network. It's Windows-only, but still cool enough for this Mac guy to find it intriguing."
...and give Google head. They'll start delivering targeted advertising based on your HDD's content, and you'll bend over and ask for more.
Your blind faith in Google is misplaced.
I agree with you on this one.
I'd use this tool in a minute if I wasn't using IRC, firefox, thunderbird and StarOffice on OS X.
Open source community, I hear a cry for a new project.
Prontab.net - Porn for geeks. (nsfw)
Do you forget Spotlight technology in Tiger which does this too and is integrated into the OS?
forget it.
Yahoo's coverage says: "Microsoft Corp., which is working on a similar file-searching tool that it recently said would not be ready for the next version of its Windows operating system promised for 2006."
So it looks like the new MS search functionality won't even make it into Longhorn? I don't see why it's so difficult... I mean if Google could accomplish it, without intimate knowledge of the OS, Office/Outlook/etc file formats, and such, why can't MS do it 5 times faster? I'm confused.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Well, I'd assume a ".doc" file created by OpenOffice, et al, would still be searchable by the desktop engine. It also searches through text files, etc. What do you save your word processing documents in?
Trolling is a art,
That would be fantastic...my spiritual pain was caused by reading their list of supported apps, which was AIM, Outlook (Express), text, IE, Excel, Word and PowerPoint(!).
I supposed they didn't say it didn't work with other apps.
If I wasn't at work, I'd download it and futz. But I am, which means even if I did install it, it would happily find IE, Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
*sigh*
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
And does it call home like X1? That's the sole thing that kept me from buying X1. Nothing that's conducting full-text searches of every file I have is going to be allowed to connect to the Internet, ever.
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
It closed Opera on me. However, it says that it doesn't work with Opera.
I think there must be certain files that it needs to update, and Opera/Firefox/etc may have them locked. perhaps.
It closed Outlook on me too.
Now it's indexing all my files, Outlook, etc. Quite a nifty little thing.
Only works on Windows XP and Windows 2000 SP3+, incidently, so worthless if you have Windows ME.
It's handy for me in work (with I have to use Outlook, Office, etc), but at home I use Thunderbird, OO.org, and Trillian, so I don't think I'll be installing it at home. Though I might just for search my files...
T.
Google Desktop will only index when you are not using your computer for 30secs (I read the 30 sec rule in the OReilly review). I want to see how much it indexes when I return from lunch.
So far, its a pretty cool tool.
-- ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
You are a hetrosexual male with an internet connection. You really think your wife needs to use google technology to work that out?!?
My suspicion is that they went after the most popular applications first, with additions coming in the future.
This makes sense: start with a larger userbase. If someone wrote a really great audio tool, that only supported OGG instead of MP3, it wouldn't take off very fast (if at all). Same thing here.
now if only it would allow me to link it to a gmail account to include that mail as well as the outlook stuff.
Now they can give us targeted ads based on our filenames! I mean, why not? They already do it based on your gmail. It's only a matter of time. Very clever, google.
http://www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com/
First, just agreeing with all the other posts that the applications it uses by default have to be some of the absolute worst.
Second, how are they going to make money off of this?
Third, they are starting to look really evil. They are leveraging their *near* search monopoly to do things that others couldn't possibly do.
I remember the beginning of Microsoft. I used to love their products and recommend them over others (such as Macs). *It was only at the exact moment that I realized I was being "locked-in" that I started hating the fuckers*.
Even more than an OS, a search engine database should be open and accessible to all. Sure, they're not going to make it convenient when their resources (in their perspective) are better allocated doing things that will increase their own revenue. Still, what happens when they start adopting awful privacy policies? What happens when they start adding dumb features that you hate, but you can't do anything about it because the initial advantages were so great that you decided to adopt it, not realizing it was a one-way Chinese finger trap and there was no way out.
Where in God's name is all the source code to any of their stuff? How about GMAIL? Why don't they give out that source code? It's not like it would really hurt them to have other people running their own copy, while providing the ability to tap into some of google's centralized API's for things.
If MS wants to get a leg up, they need to return to the days of doing what they did best *at first*. Give people more control. Give me my own personal server where I can do those types of things free from the intrusion of some big mainframe-era-thinking company, and provide huge opportunities for ME to create my own new services and business off of that stack.
Google sucks. MS sucks.
I sincerely doubt I've ever so comprehensively fucked up typing escape characters.
"Should have used the 'Preview' button," indeed.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
MS is big. Really really really big. Gigantic. This means that often things are not going to be moving all that fast but worse still it allows for a real danger off management explosion. 10 progammers need 1 manager. 100 programmers need 10 manager and a manager to manage the managers. 10.000 programmers need 100 managers plus 10 managers of managers and 1 to manage all them and so on right?
WRONG. It is more like 100 programmers need about 10 technical officers, 10 project leaders, 5 project supervisors, a human resource staff, marketing, etc etc etc. To lazy to type it all out but I been in situations where software development had me the programmer reporting to well over a dozen managers all who had their own agenda. So I spend less time programming then doing meetings.
Worse a really good programmer who just spends his time developing will be quickly out of the loop and unable to find an audience for his ideas.
MS probably has several teams who could easily do this. They are just lost somewhere in the management jungle.
Why not find them? Well why should they? Management is doing okay, windows keeps selling the bonusses keep coming in. Why should management go after those creepy skilled programmers when they can deal with nicely suited once who speak their language and deliver the next point upgrade not to much past the deadline?
Lets be honest (ms apologists cover your ears) MS has never been an inovative company at the leading edge. For crying out loud, it started as a unix company after every one else already had done unix and then turned it into dos.
it added a gui only after only everyone else had done one and stole the design. it only got a somewhat 32bit OS by stealing it from IBM and the final irony (someone else pointed this out to me recently) only got that 32bit after others had already had gone to 64bit.
MS can do it 5 times faster, if it wanted. It doesn't. So far playing catchup has worked extremely well. What you don't like the MS search function? Your not that bright are you? The only reason you don't like it is because you paid MS to use it. They got your money wether you like it or not. Your confused and poor, Billy isn't.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Yeah, their privacy policy leaves a bit to be desired. Notice that in that privacy policy, it states (among other things) that:
Your computer's content is not made accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit permission.That says to me that sending the results (index information) to Google is technically possible, it just isn't turned on by default! I wonder how long it'll be until malicious code finds away to take advantage of the indexed information, to the detriment of the desktop user?
Does Google Search not have 'don't index these directories' functionality?
So the wife just opens the preferences and reads which directories were excluded from indexing...
i have been using this for the past 30 minutes at work. all the while my friends are messaging me, i am reading emails - and i am able to see the status of the number of indexed items grow with every chat i engage and with every email i read(not literally of course). What scares me is how instantaneous it indexes things. it would easily allow my boss to search and find the ONE conversation that breaks policy. This is really cool - but it strikes fear into my cold black heart.
i was poking around wiht the indexes a little
(located at C:\Documents and Settings\~username~\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Google Desktop Search\ in xp) and i really wasn't able to ascertain anything. haha. i just want to see how 'encrypted' the aim chats are. logs are scary at work. and searchable hidden logs are even scarier.
Producing satire is kind of hopeless because of the literacy rate of the American public. - Frank Zappa
I did not read this before downloading:
4. What are the system requirements for running Google Desktop Search?
Google Desktop Search is currently available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above. To install, you must have administrator privileges (home users shouldn't have this problem; people in offices might). It also requires 500MB of space available on your hard disk. We also recommend a minimum of 128MB of RAM and a 400MHz Pentium processor.
"Spotlight is better and it is fast! In Macworld keynote speech, Jobs demonstrated it and the search result was fast and instantaneous"
:P I don't know whether to laugh or be scared of your gullibility.
Because we all know company demonstrations from CEOs are done in realtime using the current alpha software.
That was Windows98 and MSIE 4.0, btw. y'know, just in case you were wondering how that turned out.
Not to be flamebait, however, because I think Apple has a better eye turned towards security in 2004 than Microsoft did in 1998.
::jafomatic
I think you have it nailed. And this is why Microsoft is going to lose.
Microsoft want to own your desktop.
Google doesn't even want you to *have* a desktop. Google Desktop Search is the first step to blurring the difference between the desktop and the internet.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
Does anyone remember the targetted advertising of Gmail and how it sorta browses your email to place "relevent" ads on your screen?
Now uhh.. they want to be on your desktop, integrating with the browser, your email, your chat clients and so on?
Am I the only one that didn't overlook that just maybe Google wants to get in on the ground floor of your computer so it can sell you shit you're only vaguely interested in? Now I know that it says it'll only send what you give it explicit permission to send (did you read that EULA carefully? I didn't, just considering the possibilities) Also says non-identifying statistics will be sent.. you can opt out of that. What statistics? The list really sorta goes on. I'm not slamming Google for doing this. I just don't trust them as far as baby pigs can hop.
I personally can't imagine me giving Google permission to browse my computer, email, and chats at will. That's some scary stuff. I can see Homeland Security rubbing their hands together and writing the "we want that info" letters now--cause we're all terrorists you know... it's only the degree of terror we're willing to inflict.
The world according to SComps
I've been using Quicksilver for the past six months and not only do I have access to all of my drive data, iTunes playlists, Safari (and other browser) bookmarks...but I also rarely use a mouse anymore. I don't have to poke around folders at all since with a hotkey I can type a few characters for Quicksilver to present a list of likely objects that I'm looking for. QS also ranks the hits based on usage, so for the most common tasks I only have to hit the hotkey, a few (or one) character(s) and hit enter. Like, for my Slashdot bookmark it's just apple-space, type 's', and hit enter since it seems to be the most common object I use that starts with "s". Quicksilver is completely extensible through a published API and a healthy user community writing plugins to access just about any kind of data that today's Macintosh has.
Indispensible, and this is what I would hope the major MS/Apple/etc. efforts produce. Somehow I doubt it, though.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
This would be an excellent product to add some APIs to. People are complaining about PDF, Trillian, GAIM, Firefox, etc. If an API allowed users to add their own extensions to search for other formats, we wouldn't have to wait for google.
I request APIs for extensions.
I'm not sure what you mean by "XML-derived" - it uses xml - not a derivating of it.
And like I said, it's the new OO.o format. (As opposed to the old staroffice format) And both openoffice.org and kword are switching to it.
She KNOWS you have been downloading porn. This will just let her find the evidence.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Desktop searching is less useful than you might imagine. Truly losing track of a local document is not as common as, say, losing track of an image--now there's a hard search problem! This is where Google has the real edge over Copernic: http://www.copernic.com/ By integrating with their browser tools, Google causes every GDS search to automatically incorporate desktop results, rolled-up, at the top of the returned Google page. You see *both* local and global results for everything you look-up. This reinforces the utility of local search every time you use Google, where Copernic just sits there on the taskbar, waiting for the occasional use. So does GDS, but I'll wager you'll rarely use it. Compared to the number of times you web search and are surprised to see local hits incorporated in the return, local search will be insignificant. Reinforcement of utility is important to adoption. Even if you don't mean to, getting local drive results every time you Google will feel gratifying. Advice to Copernic: sell out to Yahoo now.
And I thought people here don't like monopolies...
Google != monopoly, right now anyway.
A monopoly: when your forced to use the company's products because you are locked in and don't have much of a choice.
Google: you WANT to use the company's products because they make your life easier, work very well, and don't cost anything.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
JMJ + OBT
Some men are in the present age still struggling to practice the the virtues of sexual purity and chastity. Including ones that regularly use the Internet as part of their jobs and/or recreation. Part of that effort is practicing custody of the eyes, which means choosing to give up entirely the viewing and/or stashing of pornographic materials.
You'd be surprised at how much better your relationship with your female romantic interest and your friendships with you girlfriends can be once you do this. But it's not easy and can't usually be done without His help. Self-mastery, self-control, self-denial and temperance -- they're not easy but are worth the effort, as they are key elements in the cultivation of a vibrant interior life.
After a while, you get to where you really can't watch plain old cable TV without being offended and/or tempted beyond your strength -- that's good, it means your growing in purity! But, it also means giving up on much of our over-sexualized Western media.
IC XC NIKA
Try out quicksilver. It will allow you to catalog just about anything in order to get fast access with just a quick key combo. (Launch apps, custom searches, search filesystem, control iTunes, etc.)
Could this be the beginnings of Google Backup?
Jobs doesn't exactly have a history of playing fair during his keynotes. Remember the iBook with the wireless video connection he got specially rigged (to show off the new wireless capability)? Or the "Keynote" software which he didn't show off using an ATI chipset (which would sometimes kernel panic when run)?
I got the software, too. It's ok: but it's clear Steve made sure everything was absolutely indexed and chose words where he knew the exact results. Anyone in his position would do the same. My point is that people shouldn't rely on what's essentially a marketing pitch as a demonstration of a product's worth. People also shouldn't rely on Apple as having a halo over its head. That's absolutely foolhardy.