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Google to Launch Mac Version of Google Desktop UPDATED
phaedo00 writes "Arstechnica is reporting that Google today announced that they are pursuing a Google Desktop for Apple's Mac OS X. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt saying it had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows. 'We intend to do it,' Schmidt said." Update: 10/30 23:51 GMT by M : Seems like Reuters and others may have heard wrong about a potential Mac version.
Why would google try to compete with Spotlight which will offer a lot more features than googles win-desktop search does?
It's great to see this happening, but what I'd really like to see is a Linux version.
Of course, most of the world doesn't care, so it wouldn't be likely 2 happen.
Whilst I wish what you were saying was true all the statistics I have seen place Mac around 2-2.5% and Linux 0.5-1.5%. Could you tell us what stats you are basing it on?
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I thought Google doesn't suffer so much from bad design. Tying such app to platform is definitely very bad design choice, especially if there are plans to port it to different platforms. They could save a lot of development time by using platform abstraction instead of direct usage of Win32 API throughout the code. I wonder why Google engineers have chosen such a strange approach. Maybe they were too short of time?
The idea of desktop search is good, but I think the google version lacks in few details.
.doc .ppt etc. formats.
You cannot define which directories to index, and it only indexes single machine. (understandable since it's desktop search, not small network search)
The google search keeps index of the data on the desktop harddrive. If you have lots of files, the index size gets insanely large, some say nearly 2Gb when you have large amount of documents lying around.
It would be relatively easy to build something similar which would work over administrative shares using samba crawlers with defined administrative password for each machine, and you'd have control of which data it would collect. Maybe nfs crawlers too. Plenty of both freely available.
Tricky part is to create the meta indexing of the containing
But the more open developement would allow other indexing, such as ID3 tags.
And perhaps you could add your own meta data to indexed files by filetype, and enhance the search for example only images by containing meta description something like: "meta this image has: cat vase window apple". Search for apple and it returns that picture, crude but works atleast partially.
Problem with this kind of version is that you'd need separate server for the searching, you could reuse some old machine for this.(not problem for most of people here since everyone has extra box somewhere in intranet)
Make the search running with mysql+apache and it would be almost platform independent.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
" I guess Google must not know that Linux has now outpaced desktop installs vs Mac's.."
What google knows is that most Linux desktop installs are downloaded gratis, installed gratis and that the owner/user likes/is interested in "gratis". I'd suggest that many of the machines are home-built not bought-built too?
OS X, OTOH costs money, and only really (Pear notwistanding/not useable) runs on hardware that has to be paid for (pre-built) at the same time as the OS.
Think about it;
User interested in free-stuff / cost savings
vs
User who paid the Apple premium.
Where would _you_ rather vector a global ad-network to???
User who
I can say, that I know many persons using GNU/Linux as their desktop OS, but I don't know anyone using Mac at home.
Also ~ 5-6 % of my homepage visitors are using Linux, only ~ 0.3-0.5 are using Mac's (MacPPC+MacOSX).
At least in Latvia (where I am living) Linux is more popular than MacOS. I'm too use GNU/Linux (Slackware) as OS for my workstation at home.
They claim Mozilla has over 17% market share.
Maybe for a select group of users. Slashdot statistics could be similar. But for a website for the general public, that figure would be much too large.
..."Competing with Apple==BAD!!!!"
Don't you guys ever think... "man, more competition...maybe Apple will offer me more next time around to compete with google"
Or
"Wow, I really like this new google desktop search engine. I think I'll use it"
Sometimes I think apple could offer crap on a stick and you fanatics would buy it and defend it just because Apple told you to.
Oh, and before you ask, I own 5 Macs, including a pair of powerbooks, a G5, and 2 iMacs, but get a little real here.
Maybe he uses a Mac?
Everything Google has done so far has been pure gold, so it's hard not to believe they've their acquired their taste from having at least a passing familiarity with the best designed OS GUI around.