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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."
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.
I know Google's just playing the numbers (far more Win users than Linux) but you would think that there would be at least enough respect present for them to develop and release for both platforms in tandem. Google has the resources to do that, it's almost like some sort of 'love yet neglect' relationship that churns out of American movies these days.
I hope Google has bigger plans than slowly rolling out its apps in Linux well after it's put them out in Windows.
My work here is dung.
What would be really powerful would be a google desktop search which could search multiple machines at once eg. your desktop, laptop, perhaps even keeping an offline index of your usb drives. Then you could search in one place and easily find whatever you're looking for. I can see the privacy issues now, though.
What, outside of an inbuilt level of paranoia, leads you to think that Google will know what's on your hard drive?
They have actually a somewhat poor track record of security in their desktop offerings (desktop and web accelerator).
My built-in level of paranoia says, the problem's more to do with this app being a generic attack vector for anyone willing to abuse your computer.
Beta testing has lost all meaning thanks to Google, how long before we see companies using 'Gamma' testing, for products that they want the consumer to have more faith in than a beta product but still have the excuse of "it's in gamma testing at the moment" when anything goes wrong.
That sounded too 'marketing', I feel sick.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
So, how long do you think it will be before Google sues the Linux community to remove slocate and similar programs from the OS?
Picasa may have used Wine, but it certainly didn't set a pattern. Google Earth isn't using Wine as far as I can tell:
http://earth.google.com/download-earth.html
It runs faster on my Linux box than on my Apple computer. A recent Google presentation claimed they'd be doing more and more things on Linux and I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Some people already do this. The Auctioneer addons pack for World of Warcraft has alpha, beta and gamma versions released before the official release.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I am probably one of the LEAST organized people you will ever meet but, like the parent poster, I've used desktop computers forever and am totally at a loss to explain this obsession with "desktop searching".
I have Doc folders and photo/music folders and temp folders for projects and I've got e-mail back to 1999 (and routinely go back and look for old e-mails) but have never needed more than just Thunderbird's search capabilities (and rarely use that).
I'm seriously interested in WHY people need a tool like this. Is it for finding cross-referenced material (like an e-mail that corresponds to a doc file)? Is it because people no longer want to use file managers? What's the deal?
Thank you, Google, for creating a "Google Desktop" menu category in the root of my Gnome menu. It is *so* much easier to find applications organized by name, as opposed to being organized by the general function (eg, "Games", "Graphics", etc)
sudo apt-get remove google-desktop-linux
How would you "find in the last quarter documents all appearances of the term minimize risk", by laying files in structured folders?
find ~/documents/2007-0[456]* -print0 | xargs -0 grep -Li "minimize risk"
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Google Earth uses QT as most Google apps do. The reason Picasa uses Wine is because they acquired Picasa and it was already Windows based.
From the linked blog post: For most Linux users, looking for files, documents, or emails usually involves some combination of 'find' and 'locate,' but sometimes these tools don't quite do what you're looking for, like finding that single PDF containing the specific topic you're looking for. Or you just wish there was a much easier way to find something than 'find /home/username -name '*.pdf' and 'pdftotext pdf_file_name.pdf output.txt...'
Or we use Beagle... Besides, using find, locate and stuff like pdftotext and detex is quite powerful, because you can't do stuff like 'locate libpng | grep ^/usr > libpng-list.txt' in neither Google Desktop, Beagle, Spotlight or whatever MS calls their search-thingy.
"Live free or don't."
void *fn = dlsym(NULL, ReverseString("tekcos"));
But more generally, it's very common for programs to use utility libraries that make network calls on their behalf. Simply shelling out to wget would bypass your absurdly simple check and doesn't have to be malicious. How much software is written these days that invokes BSD sockets directly? I wouldn't do it if I had a better library to wrap it, and usually I do.
Your faith is remarkable but misguided. How many people do you think read the 10,000 line auto generated shell scripts we call "configure"? Not many. Probably none.