I’ve been using the latest Google Desktop Search beta, and generally liking it. While there are some things I’d like to see done differently, it’s immediately useful in a way that changes your expectations for how to use your computer — and that’s significant. I thought I’d share some experiences and compare it to other options in this category.
I have used dtSearch, which is generally well-regarded but has a user interface that only the programmer who made it could love. It feels like a brute force approach: point it at your directories and it rips through them to build indexes. Searching is a bit awkward and confusing, but you can usually find what you’re looking for.
If you’ve used Mac OS X 10.4 you’ve probably played with Spotlight, the built-in search that’s similar in many ways but has a different feel. By comparison to dtSearch, Spotlight is a smooth, pleasing experience with a seamless feel. Searching is simple and results are presented in meaningful groupings.
Google Desktop is actually several applications in one; at it’s minimal it’s just a text field embedded in the Windows toolbar, but it can also expand to be a full dashboard of little applets or portlets. These are potentially addictive and certainly distracting little boxes that scroll your inbox, rss feeds, random photos from your disk, weather, tasks, notes, etc.
The index is built in the background, very slowly. The processes are supposed to only run during idle time, but it took about a day of leaving my PC alone to get 50GB indexed. Now that it’s done, however, new items get picked up pretty quickly, including new email messages shortly after you read them.
What’s struck me most about Google Desktop are:
- It’s easier than other ways of getting to information you already have. For instance, I can look up contact information from anywhere just by typing Ctl-Alt-g and then the person’s name. This beats launching Outlook or crawling to the Address book in Thunderbird by far.
- It’s integrated with the rest of the Internet so that when I run a search I don’t have to first think about whether I want something from my machine or out in the world. I *can* restrict it, but it’s easier to just those results come up with my local ones up top, and expandable.
- I love the visual thumbnails of the browser pages I’ve visited. They show up in search results in such a way as to answer the question “what was that page I found with X, Y and Z on it?” It seems so obvious it should be built into a browser…
But in the end, the really interesting effect is that search moves up from being an application to being a way of using your computer and the network at the same time. That’s a big change, and it feels like the future to me.