Google Kills Desktop Search and Gadgets

CWmike writes with an article in Computerworld about Google axing yet another product. From the article:"Google has decided to retire Desktop, an application it first launched in 2004 that is designed to let people search for files and data stored in their computers' hard drives. It was one of the first products Google aimed against Microsoft and was intended to improve upon the native search functionality found in Windows. Desktop search became an area of competition, as Microsoft responded to the challenge and others such as Yahoo launched their own products. However, Google has decided that, with the popularity of cloud computing and users' increasing comfort with Web apps, the time has come to decommission Desktop, it said in a recent blog post. As of September 14, Google will also end support for Desktop APIs, services, plug-ins and gadgets." From the looks of it the announcement implies that Google Gadgets are getting the axe too, which a few more people might be using.

Comments

dup

[Warwick Allison]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/09/03/1611214/Google-To-Shut-Down-10-Products

Re:dup

[Nimey]

Taco would never have allowed these dupes to happen.

CMDRTACO NEVER FORGET.

Re:dup

[Mathness]

CmdrTaco's tears can cure memory loss, unfortunately he never cries.

AAARGH!

[jothar hillpeople]

The cloud can't replace local storage. A 10mbps cable line is no match for an internal sata drive. And google desktop search is much faster than windows search, and is much better at finding emails than outlook's own search. I have come to rely on this at work, and am loathe to install windows search instead. I would love to see this become open-source.

Re:AAARGH!

[blair1q]

I'd like to have Google's desktop search at work, but as it's Not Invented Here, it's considered a Security Risk.

Pretty sure the CIO owns an assload of MSFT, as well.

Re:AAARGH!

[schlesinm]

I use Google Desktop Search at work. The IT people keep threatening to shut it down (but I guess Google beat them to it). It's immensely useful to help me sift through my email and files to find the one document that I need to forward to a colleague. But, due to security and privacy concerns, I can't have any of this data available online. If it's not running locally and stored locally, I can't use it.

Re:AAARGH!

[vux984]

How about a more realistic comparison between an internal SATA drive at around 50 MBps to a fast cable download of around 50 Mbps.

I have a 50Mbps broadband service, and to suggest that it is even in the same league as a local hard drive is complete nonsense.

Your hard drive actually delivers 50MB/s uninterrupted. For your internet service to deliver you 50Mbps they actually need the source to be able to send it to you at that rate reliably.

Even with 50Mbps, you tube still stutters and buffers on a bad day.... despite the content usually being less than 1Mbps.

Unless your remote hard drive is in your ISPs data center, the comparison is absurd. The internet will be slower, often much slower, and routinely inconsistent.

Then, the cable is only 8 times slower, and is fast enough for most tasks.

Even assuming it was simply 1/8th the speed. A file copy that takes 7.5 seconds locally... takes full minute to the cloud. If it takes 7.5 minutes locally... there goes an hour.

50Mbps... A 3.2GB Quantum fireball hard drive from 1996 does nearly 80Mbps. To get down to 50 we have to go back to when hard drives were measured in megabytes, Windows 3.11 was shiny, and most of us ran DOS and had a 386 or 486 CPU.

Re:AAARGH!

[blair1q]

Actually, it can. The problem is that Google's default model ships the data up to its server farm to be indexed. Having our whole server shipped up to their server, encrypted or not, gave our IT security guys a hernia.

Re:Too bad

[nigelo]

(pause) He got better?

Re:Time to decommission desktop?

[Dan667]

I could not do any meaningful work with google web apps.

Re:Time to decommission desktop?

[MozeeToby]

I can't be the only person to think that the real reason is that the built in search features on Windows 7 (and Vista for that matter) are actually pretty good. I personally haven't felt the need to go grab a desktop search tool for windows since indexed searching was baked into the OS.

Re:Google Desktop Gadgets vs Google Gadgets

[uigrad_2000]

Even though the article said "Google Gadgets", it actually links to Google Desktop Gadgets, not actually Google Gadgets.

One is web-like type apps running on your desktop. The other is desktop-like apps running on your webpage. A bit of confusion here is to be expected.

Re:Time to decommission desktop?

[unencode200x]

Just as an informational item, there are lots of options with Windows. A few that come to mind:

1) www.dropbox.com - Replicate a folder to the DropBox cloud.

2) www.Office365.com - Office 2010 in the cloud (yes, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in a browser) with lots of awesome features. For example, get a live.com account with Mesh and you can use it interchangeably with the documents on your PC. Mesh works a lot like DropBox. It also has SharePoint like features where you can open documents that are hosted on live.com or Office365.com right from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, etc. and save them to the cloud. Not to mention Exchange and SharePoint can be had with it and there are mobile apps, etc. Lots of SMBs I run across are using this. Anyone can get a Live account with Mesh and 25 GB of storage/5GB of Mesh if I recall.

3) SharePoint - Save any type of document to a company's private cloud with tight integration for Office 2003+ with versioning and a ton of other workflow/business features baked in. I've worked on docs in SharePoint on one computer, switched to another and kept on going.

Re:Something Microsoft does well

[Cinder6]

Google doesn't actually want "Google" to be a verb.

GoogleLabs

[unencode200x]

They're shutting down all sorts of things. See http://www.googlelabs.com/ this includes: - Google Breadcrumb
Fast Flip
Aardvark
Google Sets
City Tours
Places Directory
Image Swirl
Google News Timeline
App Inventor for Android (possibly open sourcing?)
Google Squared
Google Talk Guru
Script Converter (replaced)
Realtime Mytracks
Sputnik


This sucks, I've always liked the little projects they have going on there. It sounds like they have some other things cooking though, and I'm happy to see them open sourcing some of it.

Re:Something Microsoft does well

[bonch]

That's just how the trademark lawyers feel.

Re:Time to decommission desktop?

[Goody]

Please describe the most complex spreadsheet you've ever done in Google Apps. Please include the number of graphs and pivotables and how many tens or hundreds of meg of data that's in it. Bonus points if you used the solve function. Google apps is like the Fisher Price of office suites.