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

Distributed Desktop Search

[jonesy2k]

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.

Re:Privacy

[suv4x4]

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.

Re:Spousal Abuse

[ElleyKitten]

yet Google would still not allow them to try their products until everyone else had. No, that's not a correct analogy, as Google does not have to produce and sell any product just because *you* say so. A better analogy would someone getting pissed because they can't get a Ferarri engine put in their VW bug. No, it would be like a company where everyone drives a VW and uses a VW in their daily work and would be less productive if they had to switch to a different vehicle, but the company releases Ferrari accessories first and foremost and only releases VW versions long after the Ferrari versions.

And the analogies get stupider and stupider, but the point is, while no one can demand Google do anything, it's really weird that they use almost exclusively Linux computers in their work, yet Linux gets second (or third) shrift when it comes to releasing products. If they think Linux is so great you'd think maybe they'd want to support it to help make sure it's always around for them.

Re:QT, GTK or Mono?

[cmacb]

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.

Re:Spousal Abuse

[ElleyKitten]

Desktop searches are designed for the non-techies. Non-techies typically use Windows. 'Nuff said. Look, I know everyone here has hard-ons for Linux here, but please use some common sense. There's plenty of people who use Linux on the desktop, and I'm not saying they have to release Linux programs at the same time as Windows or Mac, I'm just saying it's weird that they use Linux but don't put a priority on making software for it.

That said, I'm actually just happy they've release what they have. We have Google Earth, Picasa, and now Google Desktop. We've dealt with worse from other companies.

Re:I think I'll wait

[alexgieg]

Some people already do this. The Auctioneer addons pack for World of Warcraft has alpha, beta and gamma versions released before the official release.

Finally, and Amen!

[Sturm]

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?

Google Desktop menu item

[seanmeister]

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

Re:Obsession with search

[Hatta]

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"

Re:QT, GTK or Mono?

[G Morgan]

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.

Re:Privacy

[Lillesvin]

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.

Re:Privacy

[IamTheRealMike]

No. A quick grep * socket|wc will do.

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.

If my grep does not find it, someone else will some day.

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.