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Google Desktop for Mac Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the very-frooty dept.

Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes "Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop. This software, like the PC version, indexes the content of a hard drive and serves it up on familiar Google-style search-result Web pages (or via a its own drop-down results list, if you prefer). But Google Desktop for the Mac is streamlined compared to the busy, gadget-y Windows version, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The focus is squarely on search — including local indexing of an online Gmail account of your choice. It will also index your iDisk."

5 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. Rather than Spotlight? by dancingmad · · Score: 5, Informative

    I was asking myself the same question every one else is ("why use this instead of spotlight?") and while I'm not 100% convinced to move over to it, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a good case for using it; if you're using Google homepage and Google Mail, it integrates with those (showing search results on the homepage and being able to download and search your Gmail).

    --
    "There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
  2. Re:I know this may sound stupid . . . by GreatDrok · · Score: 5, Informative

    "I can't be the only person still running 10.3.9 (on 2 boxes). Spotlight just wasn't that killer of an app to me."

    The download page says you need 10.4+ to run Google Desktop so you're still SOL.

    --
    "I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
  3. Re:Umm by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Gmail?


    Exactly. Spotlight is a desktop search. Google Desktop will index your entire browser history, will index your Gmail account locally, and your Google search history. So, that means you can search across both Web content and desktop content simultaneously.

    --
    My blog
  4. Re:What would have made more sense... by volsung · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm watching it run right now, and Google didn't reinvent the wheel, exactly. Google Desktop is running mdimport (the program that invokes the Spotlight plugins to convert files to collections of terms) in the background. What Google is providing is a replacement/supplement for the Spotlight search interface, but not all of the Spotlight software stack. This is how Google Desktop takes advantage of all your existing Spotlight Importer plugins. (Which are damn easy to write. Props to Apple for that.)

    Spotlight's indexing could use some improvement, so I'm looking forward to seeing how Google Desktop performs on my large collection of PDF and Postscript files. Spotlight doesn't seem to do very intelligent ranking of the documents it returns, so unless the search terms are fairly unique, the results can be impossible to sift through. Hopefully Google (or maybe 10.5) will improve that.

  5. Re:Umm by dan+the+person · · Score: 4, Informative

    I can't think of a single product, excluding things like toilet paper, that are meant for every single possible purchaser or user on the planet.

    You haven't travelled much have you? Many cultures do not use toilet paper.