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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."

9 of 186 comments (clear)

  1. I know this may sound stupid . . . by battery111 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    But why do I need a google app to do this when spotlight comes with my mac and does a pretty outstanding job of this already. Am I missing something?

    1. 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!"
  2. 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)
  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: I don't have a Mac by Tsar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why should I get a Mac when I can do the exact same thing on Vista?

    Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard all week.

  5. Re:Umm by rm69990 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "And why would I want to do that?"

    If you need to ask that question, don't bother downloading it, while people who DO want to do that will download it. Sound good? I doubt Google released this to please you specifically.

    Oh, and it's nice to have your Gmail locally searchable while offline without having to use the piece of crap that is called Mail.app (spotlight cannot index Thunderbird, the only desktop client I can stand using).

    What good does an open browser window do you if you're on a plane or bus with no internet connection? You see, there are these wonderful things called laptops. Wireless internet coverage is absolute crap up here in Canada.

    Sorry, but it really bothers me when people say "Why would I want/need that?" just to downplay the usefulness of a product. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. Re:Umm by John+Whitley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thunderbird, the only desktop client I can stand using ??? I use Thunderbird at work, primarily because it's been a choice between it and Outlook. But Thunderbird's mail editor is possibly the worst of any of the modern apps. It suffers from a flaw I thought was confined to the stupidity of MS Word: it is possible to delete invisible formatting marker, mangling the document's formatting. Backspace, backspace, OOPS, your document formatting is hosed. Even worse, sometimes this flaw causes the editor to expose underlying HTML/XML gunk in the editor.

    You might think you could get around all this via editing in plaintext mode, eh? No dice. There is effectively no first-class plaintext mode in Thunderbird's mail editor. E.g. you can change to "plaintext" mode, but all it does is hide the formatting bar.. any fonts in the document remain, but now you can't change them, even to make them fixed width. Pasting into a "plaintext" editor preserves the original formatting -- including the big fonts and glaring colors from that web page you just copied from. So much for WYSIWYG -- there's no way to actually see what the mailer will send out with plain text formatting. You just have to smack it all to "fixed width" and hope for the best.

    Aside from that, Thunderbird's mail filtering is fairly functional and does what I want. It seems to handle large email boxes allright, but its search is pretty slow.