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.

Comments

nice, but could do better

[Keruo]

The idea of desktop search is good, but I think the google version lacks in few details.
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 .doc .ppt etc. formats.
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.