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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?
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