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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."
Being able to google my machine would be the best thing this side of perpetual motion.
Having to start doing everything with AIM, IE, Outlook and MS-Office would be the worst thing this side of the universal solvent.
Why, oh why, did they have to specifically aim this at all the apps I don't use?
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
So far in my testing, it has performed better than MS's own indexing service which comes with Windows.
[alk]
Doesn't work with Mozilla, or Opera, or Pegasus mail, or Eudora..... Guess I'll wait for something less MS centric.
Three Squirrels
I wonder how similar this is to the new "Spotlight" feature to be included in Apple's OS 10.4 "Tiger".
With the first link, the chain is forged.
This works fantastic. I'm impressed with the speed, and accuracy of the searches.
Already two Mac people in my office are fairly jealous, because this is what they thought Sherlock would be- but wasn't.
I don't think this will make anyone change platforms, but on the other hand, it will keep a few people on Windows- until it is ported over somewhere else.
No reason to lie.
...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.
Thanks to me being a slashdot subscriber ive now had this for 6 mins and can offer a 6 minute review.
GOOGLE DESKTOP HAS CHANGED MY LIFE!!!
i achived in the past 5 minutes more than the previous 3 weeks. It found my car keys (they were under the pile of oreily books)!!!
Official GOD FAQ.
It can be downloaded here: http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search /index.html
Some not so free ones are X1 Search and dtSearch.
i installed it, and then it was like: "this will take a few hours to index" and I bailed on it. does it really take that long from what people are seeing? I'd love to use it for searching my outlook mail, but hate the idea of the overhead.
Do you forget Spotlight technology in Tiger which does this too and is integrated into the OS?
forget it.
Now my wife could easily find out if I've been downloading porn.
Great intention, bad Idea.
The sad thing about the Google Desktop is that, for the moment at least, it only supports things like the official AOL Instant Messenger software, Internet Explorer, and Outlook/Outlook Express.
And I thought Google was supposed to be this big challenger to Microsoft???
It would be nice to see support for Trillian and other IM clients in addition to Firefox/Thunderbird. I'm hopeful that this will come to fruition, I really can't see how it wouldn't. I can understand the strategy of releasing for these apps though, because of course every computer with Windows preinstalled likely has them.
-JT
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!
Come on Google, PowerPC users are a significant share of your audience.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
It helped me find a girlfriend! Thank you Google Desktop Search!
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
The product is still in beta, and on the About Google Desktop page, they say:
:)
"Google Desktop Search is still under development as a beta product. We intend to add new file, email, and chat formats and browsers as Google Desktop Search evolves, and when new formats are created and used. If there's a format you'd like Google Desktop Search to be able to search, please let us know. We can't guarantee that we'll add every type that's suggested, but your suggestions will let us know what formats are important to you."
I'm going to go suggest a couple right now, and get in on the ground floor
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Gosh - give me something like this for Linux, and I'll kiss some serious feet.
I've been looking for something for YEARS to replace the "Excite for Web Servers" (EWS) which could easily be cadjoled into indexing your own (Linux) computer when combined with a local copy of Apache.
It was downright AWESOME, but is no longer maintained, was based on an ANCIENT version of Perl, I've been unable to get it to work on anything beyond RedHat 6.2, and rights are not available anywhere that I've found.
My home directory is 12 GB in size, and contains work going back 6 years. Making all this searchable would just be the cat's meow...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Linux users can try out Nat Friedman's Beagle, which does something like what Google's desktop does. The Dashboard project uses it to find information pertinent to your current desktop task and displays it in a sidebar. Pretty neat. It's one of the C#/Mono projects that's available for Linux.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
They own gdesktop.com http://www.directnic.com/whois/index.php?query=gde sktop.com Why not use it?
What's next? The Google operating system? Are we looking at the beginnings of a next-generation Microsoft-like empire?
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.
I wish it would search PDFs. I have a lot of free books, data sheets, manuals, etc. all collected over the years in a nice hierarchy of directories but it is always hard to find something that I usually try Google first before searching my collection. If it can instantly find stuff in my PDF it would help me a lot.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
Here is a thorough review.
Opera Watch - An Opera browser blog.
Don't figure I will need this on Mac, since Spotlight http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html/ will pretty much serve a similiar purpose.
For those of you that don't know, take a look: http://lookoutsoft.com/Lookout/
Microsoft bought this company which beat Google to the punch on desktop searching. Kinda funny that the letters on the main logo look very Googlish...
Of course, what would be really nice is if new formats were supported via plugins, and if google would distribute a simple API so the open source community could contribute new plugins rather than waiting for google to implement them.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Well, you could install it to your Gmail Drive Shell Extension That should hold it :)
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Only one possible conclusion to be drawn: Google Desktop must contain a trojan distributed file system which provides the storage space for GMail ;-)
It's just a little game of give and take (a gig)
Great intention, bad Idea.
Google search and ranking in my pc!??! How will all of the PIGEONS fit in there?!!?
?SYNTAX ERROR IN LINE 42
It asks you on install if you would like to allow it to send data and crash reports home. How nice of it.
I don't know what they are, but the install complained that I didn't have them enabled, and that I couldn't use it unless they were. I hit cancel.
I've shut off and/or disabled everything I could in IE, and never use it. Can somebody explain what IE Add-Ons are? Sounds dangerous.
- Kevin
The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act.
Another one bites the dust
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.
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?
On the screenshots he's connecting to 127.0.0.1:4664 Does this mean I can type in ip addresses of other computers on my network that have the Google Destop installed and search them as well?
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.
Another important difference is that Spotlight will be able to do incremental search, which is a terribly much better interface for searches.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Somehow I think Google didn't just take their "Google engine" and throw it in an .exe file. In fact, the amount of files on a typical computer could be solved using some kind of SQL database engine, or a simple XML storage system. I don't think this application is about the engine, but about the indexing that takes place. Unless you have a billions of files on your computer, the Google engine would be overkill.
I'd go as far to say that this product has absolutely nothing to do with the "google engine". Just another nice app courtesy of the Google labs. The way it integrates into google.com is kind of freaky, though.
Yes, lots of MS-centric qualities here.
But the text searching alone is cool in my book. Am waiting for the crawl to reach my development folders, where this tool could search through multiple projects in multiple languages faster than anything else. Provided the code is ASCII, of course...
What Would Sutekh Do?
You have to read the documentation to set it up, but swish-e is an indexing and search system that I've found to be quite effective. It can handle MSWord (with catdoc) , pdf (with xpdf) and mp3 meta tags. It's also not very hard to write a script to extract OpenOffice.org documents to stdout as well. It comes with C and perl bindings and there is a python interface as well.
I have been using another app called Avafind for the longest time now. Google app wouldnt even install becuase it conflicts with netlimiter (no way im uninstalling that one! ) Avafind : http://www.think-less-do-more.com/avafind/ lets see what other ppl think about this app. take care all Yasir
The is a better tool out there for the mac: QuickSilver
http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/
I have been using that for months now and don't know how I could get by without it.
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 installed it about an hour or so ago (home pc), and have some 22,000 items indexed, which includes a portion of my work Outlook email (VPN connection, died -- looks like network is down). Searches are very quick, and it's nice that a regular google search checks your desktop search as well. I wish, like every one else that it would search my firefox cache, since I don't use IE at all except for updates. I would rarely need to search my web cache, so that's not a huge problem. Hopefully a future release will add pdf and gmail support as well. For me, IM history is not an issue since we use it so infrequently.
Will install on work PC next week - curious if it follows mapped network drives as well. Maybe I'll finally be able to find the files I've been looking for over the past two years!
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.
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.
There is a program called X1 that does the same thing. It's been out for a long time and works with Mozilla Mail and just about everything else on my HD.
http://www.x1.com/
It also works with a lot more file types.
Here is part of the list
If your *friend* is searching for gay pr0n on your computer, I don't think you will have to worry about them finding your hidden stash.
At least that's the way I interpreted it.
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.)
"Once the Google search technology is installed for free on a personal computer, it will transmit basic data daily about usage patterns. For example, it will tell the company how often Google is being used to search personal computers, how often it is used to search the Web, and how often simultaneous searches are done. Google lets users opt out of sending some usage data, but not all of it.
However, Mayer said the data collected will be aggregated so that the company knows where to focus its efforts on upgrading the search technology. She emphasized that the daily up-loading will not transmit any personal information to Google and said it is typical for major software programs that offer voluntary upgrades and fixes for bugs to capture that sort of information as a matter of routine."
This makes me hesitate to install it on my work PC, even though indexing Outlook is soooo tempting ...
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
It's a lot less fun when your Google search finds your OWN porn.
Anyone know how the index is stored? I assume it's stored locally?
So does the index return the results to google, so google can render it to you?
Call me skeptical, but if there's sensitive information, how much does google see?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The software was demoed and handed out at WWDC 2004. I installed it and did the exact same thing Steve did and guess what, it worked exactly the same. In fact, if you sign up for ADC select (or, if you went to WWDC), you can download the updated software seed that runs even faster.
The only gullibility that's going on is you thinking Apple is full of lies and deceit just like Microsoft....
I type the word bug into my search box, it behold it list everything in the system32 directory.
They've also posted a newsgroup where you can go and chat about it: http://groups-beta.google.com/group/Google-Desktop -Search
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
-Xenocrates
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it. Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB(Hello I think next time it might say I have P3) of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left. If I really had 1 GB I would be playing Halo.
I'll wait.
/Lars
Copernic Desktop Search http://www.copernic.com/ is also free and pretty good too.
Kind of like the American incarnation of democracy. Started here, improved over seas.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
It indexes C/C++ files! Google wins!
This was quite expected, there have been rumors about it for quite some time. The bad thing is that at least in this very particular case M$ did have an edge over google. For close to decade M$ has had an indexing tool that is quite effecient in searching through the files for text and other information. And it is quite real time too. If you search through the index and then modify any file the index is updated immediately. However because of internal conflicts in M$, they have not been able to put it at the fore front. It has a poor interface, and is disabled by default. Though XP gives a slightly better interface to it. I still don't know how many people enable it. Too Bad I can't use it, it says that it requires 1 GB of hard disk and I only have 248 MB left. I just wonder what reaction of /. would have been had this been the case with Microsoft Desktop.
Just means it won't save and be able to lookup your previous search results.