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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.
BSD version :)
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I'm curious what improvements Google will make to the overall user experience of Mac OS X. Search is already a fundamental part of the Mac desktop experience: virtually every application features a search field in the upper-right hand corner of the window (lower-right-ish for some bizarre reason on iCal). The Google mantra of "search, don't sort" is at least partially alive on this platform today.
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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The issue probably is not the filesystem, but rather the UI programming and the linking of programs to document types.
This is of course very different between Windows, Mac and Linux (and within Linux there are, as usual, several different methods)
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.
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" 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
The competition is going to be tough on the Mac platform with launchbar, quicksilver allready there and do not forget apple's upcomming spotlight. Seems like another fine example of a function at which the Mac platform is ahead of its competition: "fast access to content".
Sunny Dubey
The question is: why?
I have the WWDC Tiger Beta and Spotlight is just flawless. It's totally integrated into the desktop instead of just being browser based, it supports way more file formats, it searches in real time as you type, it lets you save searches as virtual folders and what not...
Not to mention that Mac users are a fanatical bunch that usually upgrade when they have the chance, meaning that a year from now the majority will be using Tiger.
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Most importantly, this is not about API, this is about data. What this is all about is searching and indexing datafiles and from this point of view the files on a typical Mac OS X machine and a Linux desktop will be quite different.
For instance on Mac OS X, some data files are actually bundles, i.e a directory with a special bit telling the Finder to handle the folder as a single file. Keynotes files are bundles with extension .key that contain an XML manifest an the different files included in the presentation. Older Mac OS filetypes would store some meta-data (icons, keywords) in the resource forks. Those things have, as far as I know, no equivalent in the Linux world.
On the other hand, a Linux version would have to cope with the differences between distributions (what source code should be indexed on gentoo machine?) , the different desktop managers (they might store interesting information), and different file format (it would be nice if it could parse tgif files for instance).
In the end, it is all about data, not about licences, APIs or anything else. The whole point of meta-data and searching, for me, is not about indexing my music collection (I keep it organised), but to be able to search my old files, which include Quickdraw 1 Picts and Word 4.0 (DOS) files.
Or, if Qt is an issue, why not Java ?
And we are talking Google, the Champions of the internet, and a serious competitor for MS on some areas ... cross platform should be the way to go for them !
I guess Google must not know that Linux has now outpaced desktop installs vs Mac's..
Maybe they know it didn't?
It could be that the first version of Googles software doesn't do anything that Spotlight doesn't. But they probably have a business plan that is far more far reaching than people think.
They may just be doing the ground work and getting an installed base for the next version Google Desktop which will connect you to froogle and let you search your desktop as well as your Google Mail in one fell swoop.
I'm just trying to think how they can integrate their Google Desktop with what they already have to make money.
Didn't they just buy a map company?
So you could have this one box where you do a search and if Google Desktop recognizes it as an address it'll bring up a map instead of searching your local computer. Much like it gives you the answer 4 when you type in 2 + 2 instead of searching the web.
So Google is in a position where they can give you one single search box which will let you search for anything you want and it will intelligently look in the right place.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
That's a little harsh - the grandparent wasn't saying that Google shouldn't do this, simply that they could have better used their time to make a more useful product since an OS integrated version of the same thing is coming soon.
I'm a Mac user, and on one hand I quite agree that this competition is good for us - Google's program is good and motivates Spotlight to be better, and Dashboard vs Konfabulator promises to force innovation from both sides. OTOH though, Google, Apple and Pixoria are all excellent software makers and if each focused on things that weren't being done by the others it would be an overall gain in the quantity of useful software without much of a quality hit since these people all have a history of doing things well much of the time, competition or none.
I don't really know what the optimum balance would be here, but I don't think that Google have quite hit it - I just feel that they're misdirecting their time on things that are already being done well by Apple, just as Apple are wasting their time on things that are already being done well by Pixoria.
Spotlight is not an app, it is a collection of technologies which make it possible for 3rd party apps to support searching.
At the same time, the 1st party (Apple) will be demonstrating how it's done by building search into all the system's own apps, eg, searching for the control panel which changes the desktop pattern within the control panels area. Yes, I know I'm calling them control panels when they're actually system preferences because most posters sound like they haven't used Mac OS X.)
This doesn't mean 3rd parties shouldn't attempt to compete at searching, quite the reverse: Spotlight is FOR 3rd party developers who want to do searching..
So not only would Google Desktop not be in competition with Spotlight, it could actually use its hooks into the OS to create something very powerful indeed.
In this case, though, what the non-Apple competition is going to be offering (at least in relation to Spotlight) is much less.
Disclaimer: I've used GDS beta on Windows, and I've used Spotlight on the Tiger WWDC preview. I'm sure what both companies will offer in sucessive versions will be more advanced.
GDS on Windows is a nice idea that's limited by the small number of data formats that it supports. The only file formats it understands are the ones specifically baked into it by Google. There is no way (at current) for a developer to add support for custom file formats, nor does it give you any way to exploit the metadata already present in many very common file formats (e.g. JPEG, PNG, MP3, etc.) In other words, if I had a 1024x768 picture of a Porsche 911 called "Porsche 911.jpg" on my HD, I could find it with GDS by searching for "porsche" or "911" or ".jpg". On the plus side, the formats that Google already knows about (eg AIM logs, Outlook [gack] emails) are well-supported.
Spotlight, however, indexes the inbuilt metadata as well, so not only could I search on parts of the filename, as above, I could also search for "picture files that are 1024 x 768" or have "epson" in their EXIF tags. In addition, if I write a graphics app and use "marmoset's magnificent graphics format" (MMGF) as my native storage format, I can write a Spotlight plugin that tells the OS how to understand the "underpants gnome" tags I've embedded in the images.
Over 90% of the visits to my company's web site are from Mac OS X systems. Do I conclude that nobody is using Windows PC's any longer? Perhaps not, since our site is of interest primarily to Macintosh users. The numbers from your home page might be skewed a bit by the subject matter of your page. Statistics from major, high traffic sites (cnn.com perhaps) might provide a better indication of what systems people use to surf the net.
Macintosh numbers are not particularly high, granted. Interestingly enough, these sorta stats may also over-represent the Macintosh user base. How's that? Well, we know that 80% of home user PC systems running Windows are infected with viruses, ad-ware, spy-ware, worms, and bots. Anecdotal evidence indicates that some significant portion of people using Windows systems don't use the internet much, if at all, due to their experiences with malware. I've even met Windows users who have given up on email, and basically don't use the internet at all!
Macintosh users, by contrast, are dramatically over-represented in the Coffee Shop Count. Watch during any week in almost any coffee shop with wireless internet access, and you'll see anywhere from 15% to 90% iBook and PowerBook systems. Even the low end of your observations will be double the representation one would expect from the installed user base. Macintosh users seem to use their systems more, user the internet more, and use wireless access in public places more, on average, than Windows users.
I expect to see a similar trend over the next year with Intel based systems running Linux, due to recent and forthcoming improvements in wireless configurations on Linux.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
Probably one of the more accurate accounts of installed base for various operating systems was Google itself on the old Google Zeigeist pages. Unfortionately Google didn't like people using their Zeitgeist pages to infer market share so they stopped doing it last July, but June 2004 shows Linux accounting for 1% of Google searches and MacOS 3%. Certainly Google still tracks this information internally and the fact that they are releasing a MacOS version of their desktop tool says a lot about how MacOS is doing in the market.
Google Zeitgeist June, 2004