Google Adds Features and Plugin to Desktop Search

Matthew Bischoff writes "Today Google added new features to its popular desktop software. Google Desktop now supports alternative Netscape based browsers like Firefox, PDFs, images, video, and music files. Google also added a plug-ins feature so that developers can integrate their software into the Google Desktop catalog. Another new addition is a supported way to search from Google's deskbar software. It's probably a matter of time until we see desktop search integrated into all of the Google products including the controversial Google Toolbar 3." Google Desktop is also officially now out of beta.

Comments

Is Microsoft out of the loop?

[tabkey12]

Who wants WinFS in 2 or 3 years when you can have Google Desktop Search now, for free?

Also, good to see Google isn't doing an eternal beta on this product like its Google News offering (the whole beta thing gets annoying after 2 continuous years!)

So is there a catch ?

[88NoSoup4U88]

So is there any catch to their desktop tool ?
I assume they're not risking their "don't do any bad "-policy for this ?

So what -is- the catch ?
I am fedup with using the regurlar search in Windows, so I am defenitely in for some improvement.

SUSE 9.3 Pro (03/09/2005) with desktop search

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, SUSE Pro 9.3 is said to be released this Wednesday the 9th, with Beagle (Desktop search) and iPod support, according to the following article which even Novell.com links to on their front page:

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,390 20 390,39190538,00.htm

Is Google Desktop Search > Beagle?

Still requires admin rights to use

[Kagami001]

"Google Desktop Search can only be used when the account from which it was installed is logged in."

Yep, that lovely message is still there when I try to use it in my main work account.
Oh, well. Maybe next time.

Re:Why? Whats it for? Whats it do

[lelitsch]

Find every occurence of a name in 400MB worth of email in less than a second. Something that crashes Eudora and takes forever in Outlook.

Got to love that panic response to Copernic 1.5

[CdBee]

There's been an informal campaign for mozilla suite support in GDS ever since it was launched

Last week Copernic 1.5b was released with full support, now Google are producing the same feature. Coincidence? If so tough luck, I already switched from GDS!

Re:Why? Whats it for? Whats it do

[mstra]

The more I've played with this, the more useful it's been. It's not been terribly useful on my home PC...but at work, it's a godsend.

For example: I did a GDS search for the name of a server I was building last week.

Bam. I got every document I had about that server. The online change requests. The service requests to site engineering. The operational handbook I wrote. The inventory spreadsheet.

Wow. That was pretty cool.

I also found out that while GDS doesn't index networked drives/shares, it *will* include documents on the network that you have opened in its search results. That was pretty good too.

It's also useful on a couple of our intranet sites. Just this morning I had to find a change request for a server - using the search mechanism of our change system is difficult at best - but because I could search it in Google, it came up right away.