Google Releases GDS 2.0

FansofTech writes "Google (now $4bn richer) has released v2.0 of Google Desktop. Many new features are introduced including improved Outlook filtering, Gmail indexing, and the feature which is most likely to cause the largest stir...a new Sidebar which displays RSS feeds, a Gmail inbox, news, scratch pad and more. Plug-ins for the new Sidebar are also available including a to-do list, clock, and more. As one blogger pointed out this morning...the release of Google Desktop 2.0 is beginning to take shape as a browser in itself as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated."

Comments

Privacy Issues

[AlexTheBeast]

I am not a huge privacy kind of guy, but google is getting a little crazy with what they save about you now.

They are now recording click-throughs on their search pages. Why do they need this information? It wasn't too long ago that links on google.com went straight to the link... not back through the google servers...

Just remember to clean out your google desktop index history.

Is our privacy now worth more than free software?

(Tin-foil hat mode off)

Re:Privacy Issues

[jeremy_a]

>> What better way to rank a page's relevancy than by determining which links are chosen by the searchers for a given keyword or set of keywords?

> bad side effect...

> page 1 & 2 search results will firmly become engrained there by this method as everyone clicks on the top few results normally

That could be a problem if the results fed directly into the page rank. But it would seem more logical to use this to cull bad links from the top 10. If people consistenly ignore the first link for a particular search, but instead click on the second or third links, it would be a good indication that the top link isn't very good and should be moved down the list, which could in turn allow a new link to bubble up to the top 10.

Data being passed back to Google?

[passionplay]

So does anyone have any news on what information is being passed back to Google or what security settings to choose so that my privacy stays intact? Or is this one of those situations where you have go "give up a little freedom" for "increased convenience" a la "giving up a little freedom" for "increased safety and security?? Thanks.

It still sits in the middle of your TCP stack

[joshrulzzatwork]

No one has posted yet, so either /. is borked or you guys are all hard at work, heh.

Reading over their developer site (http://desktop.google.com/queryapi.html), it looks like the engine still listens on the same port the first version did, so I am guessing it still sits in the middle of the Windows TCP/DNS stack so that when you go to the normal Google homepage, you see the desktop search choice, and results from your own desktop. I would rather GDS run as a process that searches my drive, listen on a port for my brower to post a search to, and then dump the results back to a browser window. The page I linked basically describes that, however without installing, I can't tell if they still incorporate themselves into their internet site.

After playing with version 1 last year, I gave http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search /Copernic DS a shot, and have been happy with it. It's fast, has its own UI so it doesn't have to hook into how Windows talks to the web to let me use it, and it indexes IM conversations (athlough you have to manually point its indexer to your chat log directory). My main complaint in memory use. At my previous job, it could take up to 120 megs of memory. Here, where I have been for only 2 months, it uses around 35.

Include a calendar

[fluor2]

Dear Google. Include a calendar, and I can finally get rid of this sh*t called Outlook.

Re:Browser need eliminated?

[isilrion]

And, of course, if you are really feeling geeky, you can launch python and
 
 

import libgmail
acc=libgmail.GmailAccount('username','pa ss')
acc.login()
msgs = acc.getMessagesByQuery('is:unread')
foreach thread in msgs:
    for msg in thread:
        print msg.source

Joking aside, I've had to do that. Very useful (and annoying) when you need to check your email, have no browser around, and you remember that you forgot *again* to enable pop3 in your gmail account.

Isilrion

P.S: Yes, that has happened!