Google Desktop Now on Linux

mytrip writes "Google was set to launch late on Wednesday a beta version of Google Desktop search for Linux in a sign of encouragement by the search giant for Linux on the desktop. Google Desktop allows people to search the Web while also searching the full text of all the information on their computer, including Gmail and their Web search history. Because the index is stored locally on the computer, users can access Gmail and Web history while offline."

Comments

Here's the link.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://desktop.google.com/linux/index.html

Beagle

[prock307]

They have Beagle http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page to compete with, not sure how useful it will be on Linux. But on Windows at work I can finally find my emails and other documents!

Re:Beagle

[Anonymous Coward]

not only beagle, but there's also http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/ to compete with, not written in mono n stuff.

Re:Beagle

[nkeric]

check out the tracker project: http://www.gnome.org/projects/tracker/

Tracker is a tool designed to extract information and metadata about your personal data so that it can be searched easily and quickly. By using Tracker, you no longer have to remember where you've left your files. To locate a file you only need to remember something about it, such as a word in the document or the artist of the song. This is because as well as searching for files in the traditional way, by name and location, Tracker searches files' contents and metadata.

It should be faster and more light weight :)

Re:Beagle

[oever]

Not only Beagle but 4 other desktop search engines. Beagle, Strigi, Pinot, Tracker and Recoll are five search engines that work together on a common search API for the free desktop called Xesam. The Xesam API is nice and the free desktop search programs are powerfull. More importantly, they have commandline tools, are faster and allow more tuning of what to index and what not. On top of that an ontology (hierarchy of fields) has been worked out that will be supported by these search engines. This will allow any desktop application to use any of these search engines to integrate tightly. No doubt a translation layer will be written to let GDS also use this API. Browsing the GDS website, these things are notable. Google Desktop Search

• is closed source software
• is widely deployed and tested on other platforms
• has a stable well documented API
• uses COM for communication
• has a large brand recognition and there will a demand for it
• calls analyzer plugins based on file extension
• has a limited, unexpandable list of categories for files
• identifies files by mtime + uri
• uses wchar_t internally
• is file based
• has a documented API for querying the search daemon ( I do not know which protocol )
• has no command-line tools

This means that just as the existing programs are starting to come to terms, Google comes and returns the chaos on the desktop search scene. While I like Google internet search, their desktop offering has me feeling eerie. I would prefer using Mono over Googles closed source program. But even better is the ultra-efficient Strigi which will be part of KDE4 and indexes streams instead of files.

Re:Spousal Abuse

[Xenex]

It's kind of sad that a company who powers its hundreds of thousands of computers in clusters with a trimmed down RedHat puts Linux second on the list of operating systems to support with its software. Third.

Google Desktop has been available for Mac OS X since April.

Re:slocate?

[LiquidFire_HK]

Because slocate only searches in the file names of files and has to update its database periodically (the latter can be remedied with rlocate), while things like Google Desktop search, Beagle, etc. search inside the files' contents and metadata as well as the names, update themselves in real time, and can show you matches from multiple sources in one place (search results from files, emails, address book, etc.)

it does

[oni]

it already does this. click preferences -> search across computers.

Re:Privacy

[molarmass192]

this app being a generic attack vector for anyone willing to abuse your computer.

Yeah but even then, that's when the beauty of Linux kicks in. If someone discovers, for example, a buffer overflow in the app, they're still facing an unknown kernel version, distro filesystem, and GCC version on top of Linux's user privileges. It's much harder to create an exploit that could be used to take over your account, let alone take control of the system. There's really no wide reaching baseline from which to build an attack on Linux, unlike Windows which has one distro, one compiler. The best they could do on a broad reaching basis is crash the application consistently or maybe corrupt the binary to delete files from your home directory if you install the application locally.

Re:This delay has been good

[McNihil]

Having run beagle (0.2.7-9) on my 300+ GByte $HOME a year ago or so was clearly an indication that it wasn't good enough... it kept on reindexing all the time... causing HD thrashing (even on a RAID0 with 200MB/s throughput.) Granted it was mostly after updates that happened and it isn't a 1.0 release but still.

I am now testing GDLinux and it feels much more sane and does not contain wine nor mono which I am quite happy with.

Re:slocate?

[6031769]

Solution: Swish-e.

Yes, it is open source.

Re:This delay has been good

[crimperman]

Have any of the projects you refer to been given front page Slashdot articles?

Hmmmm, no.

Beagle has. http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/18/ 195220

That sound of crickets chirping you hear when you search Slashdot for Beagle articles:

Did you actually go and search for it? Thirty seconds ago, this http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=beagle gave me the above article as the fourth result. It daes from Jan 2006 and I remember it making the frontpage (or at least my RSS feed).

It means that no one really cares about closed vs. open

No-one? You really don't read Slashdot often do you? :o)

I assumed the reason this made it to /. was because it meant us geeks could now stop having to say "no but it will be and here's an alternative" when asked if Google desktop ran under Linux. Now we can say "Yes but there is a better alternative".

Re:Privacy

[Simon (S2)]

And will you trawl through every line of the code just to make sure it's doing what you think it's doing? No. A quick grep * socket|wc will do.

When did the words "open source" suddenly imply best, most secure, 100% trustworthy? If my grep does not find it, someone else will some day.

Re:Privacy

[Random Destruction]

In short, security by obscurity.

Re:Spousal Abuse

[rainman_bc]

We have Google Earth, Picasa No, we have an old, stale version of Picasa with only token support now. Picasa for Linux is ass and the Blog this feature for example is now broken because they updated blogger and haven't bothered yet to catch up the Linux version.

There's a developer in the group that says they are working on it, but it's been like this for quite some time - so it shows that Google's linux support is only token support at best. If they had Linux support they'd use a cross playform development process rather than porting wine to support their apps.

Re:How does it run?

[Mr. Underbridge]

The article says it was "developed natively." So this is definitely not the win.exe version wrapped in Wine?

Nope. Runs for real, native stuff as far as I can tell. And, I might add, it runs in more than gnome and KDE as claimed - it parked in fluxbox right in the tray like a good boy. The RPM even converted to a Slack package just fine.

It hasn't indexed yet even though I've told it to, but I think it's waiting for idle time on my machine and I'm killing it this morning.

Re:Obsession with search

[Shawn Parr]

I put stuff where I can find it later using simple directory structures. Is that so difficult?

You know, I used to feel this exact same way. Even after I upgraded to Tiger I hardly ever touched the Spotlight menu, and only really used it in Mail.app where I did occasionally need a bit of help digging for some random nugget in the last couple of years worth of email archives.

Then one day about a year ago, I decided to give it a try. I think it was because I was working on a very large number of projects at the time and each project was complicated enough that they had their own nested folder structures, and while I could find everything, having to drill down into the folders was getting a bit tedious. I also have a decent number of applications installed, not a ton mind you, but a pretty decent amount, and digging through the apps folder for the utility I don't use often enough to pollute my dock with was also getting tedious.

So I tried Spotlight to see if it might make things better. I really expected to think it was stupid and go back to the status quo. What I found was that in many cases, while Spotlight was not perfect, and occasionally it was actually slower depending on what the computer was thinking about at the time, it was definitely more convenient. I use it all the time now. I still save all my documents in an intelligent folder structure with descriptive names (both for folders and for filenames), however when I need to find a manual or spec sheet for something, I type the name into Spotlight and look at the PDF results. Need to launch Cyberduck (the FTP client I use), type it in Spotlight and hit the key command to launch the first item (Applications appear at the top of the list).

Of course these desktop search programs are not for everyone. It may not work for you. However, don't knock it till you have really tried it. I don't mean try it for one search this afternoon then just dismiss it. Give it a week or two and really use it during that time. Maybe it won't work for you, but that doesn't automatically mean that the people it does work for are doing something wrong, they just use available tools in a different way.

Who cares..

[LingNoi]

I would much rather have GTalk with full VOIP and voice mail then some lame desktop search when Linux already has so many ways to search already.

If GTalk was released for Ubuntu it would be the killer app to have since everyone is restricted to using Skype. I would even pay for a fully working GTalk on Linux.

Re:Beagle - installed wrong?

[catfoo]

Beagle runs much better if you are using extended attributes, http://beagle-project.org/FAQ "Do I really need extended attributes? It is strongly recommended. There is an sqlite-based fallback in place, but using this as the primary store is slow and noticably degrades performance. Note that, with extended attributes. beagle will use some extra space for storing the attributes of each file. It depends on the filesystem how much is used for each attribute and it is a small amount. However, it can add up to some 10s of MBs for several GBs of files. Also, writing extended attributes changes the ctime of a file; this might cause problem if you are using any backup utility that compares ctime to backup changed files. If you want to run with extended attributes disabled, set the environment variale BEAGLE_DISABLE_XATTR. Keep in mind that beagle will run slower with extended attribute disabled. "

Re:Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

> All security is ultimately security by obscurity.

All cryptography is security through obscurity. Security can also be based on capabilities and tokens that have nothing to do with secrets. You can't replicate the obscure information of something you don't have.

Re:Privacy

[onemorechip]

void *fn = dlsym(NULL, ReverseString("tekcos"));

That would be insecurity through obscurity.