The Google Desktop

http://desktop.google.com

Um, wow.

Yeah, wow.

Boy they’re really extending their search philosophy to search anything, anywhere, anytime. If they come up with something to help me find my TV remote, I’ll be really impressed.

I hope they extend the email search functionality to other clients besides Outlook and other IM clients besides AOL. I use Triillian and it has a *.log format to its logs… but Google Desktop doesn’t pick it up.

Still really impressive.

They’re apparently working on their own web browser too. MS better wake up and smell the icky mocha frappe.

Wow - I just used this to do a search on my desktop for Thrustmaster, re: a review of a Thrustmaster FF joystick I’m doing, and I found several relevant items I didn’t even remember I had. What a great tool.

I like the new little “o” icon in place of the second “o”. What an incredibly handy tool. Is this a brand new Beta?

Brand spanking. It was released yesterday.

Darn handy tool.

But it has some real security problems. Not paranoia problems like “a Gmail robot will know what topics are in my email,” real life problems like “anyone using my PC can read webmail I’ve sent.” Interesting Blog.

Also, it works by running a private web server app on your system, which I’ve seen some other security concerns about. Plus as gamers, you may worry about stolen CPU cycles…

I’m not really worried about it, since my wife is the only other person who uses my PC. But pr0n fans, privacy freaks, and anyone who has roomates and extended family members using thier PCs should approach this with caution, and restrict which caches the program searches.

Good grief. Is everybody in the world disorganized? If you save your stuff in an organized manner you wouldn’t need this.

Maybe you save your stuff in an organized manner in your anal-retentive dimension, but here on planet Earth things are a bit different.

No doubt they are. Pitiful hu-mons. :P

Okay, I have a question I installed this two days ago and have left my computer on ever since. It still reads “Indexing in progress” but seems to have been stuck on 6,547 items indexed for the last day or two. I have 130 gigs worth of stuff on my computer, so I know it has to index a lot more than that. Anyone have any idea what’s freezing it up? Anti-virus or something perhaps?

It’s hung. Shut it down and try again. If you get the same error, report it as a reproducible bug and wait for the next build.

It’s in beta right now… word has it they released it when they did because Microsoft has been working on a similar tool and showed it off at some search conference. I don’t know if there’s any truth to that, but it’s been well known that Microsoft is getting BIG into search, and not just on the web, but all over. The stuff they have “out there” now is nothing like what’s in their labs.

My number was paused too, but I think I figured it out.

What happened for me is that when I started the indexing, Outlook was open; it will only index your Inbox when it’s open. So when I closed it, it paused the indexing. When I re-opened Outlook for a while, the number started going back up.

I don’t use Outlook anymore, so it can’t be that (and it only indexes Outlook when it’s open? Bizarre). I uninstalled and reinstalled it and it went through the entire indexing process. It says its done - except now it has indexed a couple hundred less files than the “partial” index before. Totally weird. Between that and it’s lack of support for Thunderbird emails, I think it isn’t ready for prime time on this computer yet.