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

Privacy

[PaisteUser]

Does anybody have concern for Google knowing what's on their local disks?

Re:Privacy

[st0nes]

Will they know? It says the index is stored locally, does that mean it never goes to Google?

Re:Privacy

[Simon (S2)]

Does anybody have concern for Google knowing what's on their local disks? Yes I do. That's why I will never use this (or any other Desktop Search that is not Open Source).

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: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: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

[nickallen]

It's a good point but then shouldn't you extend that thought to all proprietary software? Without the source code any software could be doing a search of your files without you knowing. It seems strange to say you will boycott google search but not other proprietary products just because google's product is software that performs searches. It really depends on how much you trust the vendor when it comes to proprietary software.

Re:Privacy

[somersault]

Maybe when you were given the ability to trawl through every line of code just to make sure it's doing what you think it's doing? There are a lot of very geeky/bored people out there you know.. and if anyone was dumb enough to release source that blatantly contained violations of users' privacy, then someone is bound to notice and complain, put it up on /. , etc..

Re:Privacy

[wild_berry]

I guess you could probably use SELinux permissions to deny anything from the Google Desktop access to anything like a network interface.

Re:Privacy

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

A bit of both; part security by design, and part security by obscurity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a layered defense model! :D

Re:Privacy

[ThinkingInBinary]

No, it's more like security by diversity. If a burglar had to try dozens of entirely different types of keys (never mind all the key patterns that each type includes) to break into a house, he would not find breaking into houses as attractive a prospect, and if he did try, it would be more likely that someone would notice him. Similarly, if a hacker has to try dozens of different buffer overflow attacks against your system, he's less likely to target it, and if he does, you're more likely to notice it, since naturally a buffer overflow attack will degrade into a crashed program if it doesn't actually execute the intended payload.

Besides, there's nothing wrong with security by obscurity, as long as it's only one tool. For example, moving your ssh port to 2222 instead of 22 will probably subject you to an order of magnitude or two fewer ssh worms, which is a good thing. But of course you'd still want to have good passwords. Obscurity is a useful tool, especially when you are protecting a system that has no intrinsic reason to be selected. It can make you less of a target, and since security is never perfect, any layer that reduces the probability of an attack is useful.

Re:Privacy

[Big Nothing]

I don't normally reply to AC trolls, but I'll bite today:

* No, I don't thrawl through every line of code of every FOSS program I use.
* Those programs that I _do_ go through, I can most certainly miss something or not understand something.

But it's still more likely that I'll find a secret backdoor in an open-source program than in a closed-source one. And the real beauty isn't that _I_ have to find something, but that others, like me, can find something. Nothing much can beat the collective scrutiny of a million nerds.

Re:Privacy

[MrMarket]

There's even more FUD fodder from the google blog:"Developed primarily out of our Beijing office..."

ps- let me get the next response out of the way: In Communist China your desktop searches you.

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.

Re:Privacy

[onemorechip]

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

That would be insecurity through obscurity.

Here's the link.

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Here's the link.

[suv4x4]

And notice the subtle and elegant interface the search is implemented with. That aged, oversized and messy look, a look that says "Linux desktop".

Disclaimer: yea, I totally mean what I said.

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.

I think I'll wait

[niceone]

I think I'll wait until it's out of beta, won't be long, right?

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.

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:Spousal Abuse

[EveryNickIsTaken]

Google is a publicly held company, not a soup kitchen.

Re:Spousal Abuse

[suv4x4]

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

You assume they built Google Desktop to run it on their own clustered computers? Or is this one blatantly fallacious argument you pulled off there.

How about counting the OS numbers on the machines they're targeting.

How does it run?

[oddman]

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

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:Spousal Abuse

[ElleyKitten]

Google is a publicly held company, not a soup kitchen. That analogy would only work if all the homeless people at the soup kitchen wrote their software and ran their company, yet Google would still not allow them to try their products until everyone else had.

Re:QT, GTK or Mono?

[ceeam]

"Requires glibc 2.3.2+, gtk+ 2.2.0+" - well, what do you think?

No 64 bit

[JackieBrown]

I wish they would start making 64 bit versions of their stuff so we could quit trying to force install their products.

This delay has been good

[clashdot]

Thank you Google for delaying the Linux version! We now have Beagle, Strigi, the Nepomuk project and more as free alternatives to your proprietary software. There would have been free desktop search software anyway, but most likely there would have been a bit less enthusiasm for its development, and some distributions might have flocked to supporting the Google product.

I'm excited that Linux is still flying under the radar to such a large extent, when it comes to commercial software. Soon it will be Ready For The Desktop (TM) and the Linux desktop is still 100% free!

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: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:This delay has been good

[Vexorian]

Linux was ready for the desktop years ago, although there are still people that think "ready for the desktop" means "complete windows clone"

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: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.

Web browser interface sucks

[Danathar]

Although I like Google desktop, I REALLY wish there was a way to have my results come up in some sort of file management application like explorer(windows), or Konqueror (File manager, not browser), or my file management app of choice.

You can't work with the results when they come up in your browser window.

This is one thing that Spotlight really does have going for it. Being able to have a search folder which dynamically has all the results I want whenever I open it is really useful. Now spotlight needs some work and is not perfect, but google desktop is really lacking in this area.

Obsession with search

[Orlando]

Am I the only one baffled by this obsession with local search? I send most of 5 days a week using desktop computers and a lot of the weekends, and I have to say that I very rarely need to search for anything locally. I put stuff where I can find it later using simple directory structures. Is that so difficult?

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.

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?

[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.

Woo hoo!

[sportster]

Great now we can have beta versions of malware running on our linux desktops too!

Re:slocate?

[6031769]

Solution: Swish-e.

Yes, it is open source.

Re:Linux

[dominious]

No, this must be a post from the future. Which means in 2050 there will still be issues for wireless cards on linux:/

security?

[spwelton]

For those of you on Linux with google desktop, why are you concerned about security. Just use a firewall. Firestarter is relatively easy to set up and you can watch google's stuff if you want to. Sean

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?

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.

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.

Too much space

[CockroachMan]

I used this on Windows for some time.. then I've found out that it's index was occupying 600MB of my HD! On Linux I'm happy with my " find / -name 'whatever' " :P

GoogleOS?

[The MAZZTer]

Maybe this is in preparation for Linux-based GoogleOS? We can only hope.

What make Linux secure is...

[Comboman]

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

So you're saying Linux is secure because it's hard to develop for?

Re:What make Linux secure is...

[nschubach]

So you're saying Linux is secure because it's hard to develop for? Not hard to develop for... hard to develop "around".

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: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: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. "

I usually do know...

[Hymer]

...where I save my pr0n...