NY Times article on Google Desktop Search

Fibonacci

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October 21, 2004
STATE OF THE ART
Google Takes On Your Desktop
By DAVID POGUE

THE modern PC is a marvel, isn't it? Here's a machine that lets an ordinary person with very little training create a new document, check its spelling, dress it up with graphics, send it electronically to someone across the globe - and then save it accidentally into some dark corner of the hard drive, where it will never be seen again.

Of course, every operating system offers a Find command. But the one in Windows is not, ahem, Microsoft's finest work. It requires too many clicks, it asks too many questions, it takes forever, it can't search your e-mail and its results are difficult to interpret. As a final insult, Microsoft endowed the supposedly ultramodern Windows XP with a cartoon dog that appears during the searching, as though to say, "We know this is taking a long time, but hey, watch the puppy!"

Google showed the world what great searching could look like: incredibly fast, blessedly simple, attractively designed. Unfortunately, it could only search the Web. To search your own files, you had to turn, reluctantly, back to Windows and its dog-slow mutt.

No longer. Last week, Google took the wraps off its latest invention: Google Desktop Search. As the name implies, it's software that applies the famous Google search technology to the stuff on your own hard drive. It's free, it's available right now for Windows XP and 2000 (desktop.google.com), and it's terrific.

Like the Windows search program, Google Desktop can find files by name, including photos, music files and so on. But it can also search for words inside your files, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. That's a relief when you can't remember what you named a file, but you do remember what it was about - or when a marauding toddler renamed your doctoral thesis "xggrjpO#$5%////." (Windows offers this feature, too, but it's hard to find, hard to turn on and poorly documented.)

For its final trick, Google Desktop does something so profound it may change the way you think about your PC forever: It can search any Web page you've ever seen, any e-mail message you've opened and the transcript of any instant-message chat you've had.

Why is this such a life-changing feature? Because using a computer these days means being bombarded with far too much information to remember. Google Desktop effectively becomes a sort of aircraft black box for your PC - a photographic memory, as Google puts it. The program can recall any bit of text that ever passed in front of your eyeballs, in a fraction of a second. You don't even have to remember where you read something (e-mail, Web, instant message, document); you have to remember only what it was about.

This feature, as they say in Silicon Valley, is huge.

"All right," you're probably thinking, "down, boy. There's got to be a catch." No, there are no catches. There is, however, quite a long list of footnotes.

For starters, Google Desktop is officially in beta testing, meaning that Google doesn't consider it to be finished. For the moment, its greatest limitation is the list of programs it recognizes. At this point, it can't search Acrobat (PDF) files except by file name. It can't search Web pages you've visited unless Internet Explorer is your browser, chat sessions unless you use AOL Instant Messenger, or e-mail unless you use Outlook or Outlook Express. If you don't use these programs, Google Desktop will seem a lot less essential.

Another consideration: Google Desktop Search is remarkable in the compactness of its code - the entire program fits in a 446-kilobyte download - but installing it requires at least one gigabyte of free hard-drive space. That's because, like similar programs, Google Desktop works by creating what's called an index: a multimegabyte database of the words in all your files. To search vast amounts of material, it needs a healthy swath of space for its index.

Creating its index file isn't what you'd call instantaneous, either. In fact, Google Desktop takes between five hours and all day to build its index. (The instant you start doing work on the PC, the Google indexer immediately backs off. That means your PC never slows down indexing, but it also means that Google Desktop takes longer to index than some of its rivals do.)

Once the index is built, Google maintains it by logging every document and message you open, every Web page you visit and every instant-message session you conduct. Fortunately, Google Desktop's system-tray logo harbors a handy Pause Indexing command, which you can use while you work on something that you'd rather not make searchable (midnight chatters, you know who you are). Like the Snooze button on an alarm clock, it offers to resume indexing every 15 minutes, so you don't forget.

You can fire up Google Desktop for a search in either of two ways. First, you can double-click on its system-tray icon. In a moment, you find yourself in your Web browser, confronting what looks at first like Google.com. But if you type in a search phrase and click on Search Desktop, you get a tidy list of matching items, each identified with a little icon. (When the match is a Web page you've visited, you actually see a miniature picture of it.)

You can click on anything in the results list to open the corresponding file, message, Web page or transcript. The process looks and feels like a standard Google search, a comfortable familiarity that means you have little new to learn.

The other way to use Google Desktop is a little freakier. Whenever you use the regular Google to search the Web, the results list includes a new link that says, "78 more results found on your computer." In other words, whenever you conduct a Google search, your query is sent simultaneously to Google (to search online) and to Google Desktop (to search your PC), for your convenience.

However disconcerting it may be to see results from the Web and from your own computer in such close proximity, Google says that your desktop-only queries and their results are never sent to Google; the fact that Google Desktop does not require an Internet connection supports that assertion.

Speaking of privacy, you can also turn off any of the searchable item types. If, for example, you'd rather not make your Web-surfing sessions available for searching by other family members, turn off that feature. You can also omit only secure Web pages from the log, so that your banking and stock transactions aren't available for recall. (Even so, corporations should carefully consider the security ramifications of Google Desktop's logging features.)

Now, both Microsoft and Apple have announced that their next operating systems (Windows Longhorn in 2006 and Mac OS X Tiger in 2005) will include tools promising the same kind of speedy system-wide searches as Google Desktop; clearly, the Ph.D.'s at Google weren't alone in recognizing that today's searching programs don't cut it.

But already, Google Desktop Search has many rivals. Lookout (www.lookoutsoft.com), for example, is a free- add-on for Microsoft Outlook that can search not only your e-mail but also your address book, calendar, e-mail attachments and even files on your hard drive. Microsoft liked it so much that it bought the company.

There's more power and flexibility to be had in programs like Blinkx (www.blinkx.com, free), Lycos Hotbot Desktop (www.hotbot.com/tools, free), Enfish (www.enfish.com, $50 and $200) and DT Search (www

.dtsearch.com, $200). For example, these programs can search more kinds of files than Google Desktop. Whereas Google searches only your main (C:) hard drive, its rivals can search secondary drives and removable disks (like CD's), and the expensive ones can even search other computers on your network. Most come in free trial versions, so if you're Google-phobic, by all means give them a shot.

You'll learn from the experiment, though: with great power comes great interface clutter. Few of those rivals can touch the familiarity, speed and simplicity of Google Desktop, and they don't offer Google's delicious photographic-memory feature. If you use Windows XP or 2000 - and especially if you use Outlook, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer or AOL Instant Messenger - download Google Desktop Search. You have nothing to lose but Fido the Time-Killing Windows Dog.

sixtysix

downloaded the google desktop-its very impressive but-it will easily find emails to all family members whether pasword protected or not-and despite the fact that my hard drive has been formatted recently it is showing emails posted september 2003! extraordinary stuff but how is it possible?

BloodBath

It's because formatting your drive doesn't delete the information, it only marks it as free to write over. Google taskbar must be able to read this info much the same as data recovery programs can. Pretty handy.


BloodBath

Third_Echelon

I dont know about all this google desktop stuff.... Am I the only one who thinks this isnt a good idea???

Shouldn't you know where you store your data anyway?

I dont like the idea of something like this recording every move i make and everything i type and indexing it... not that there is a whole lot of dodgy stuff that i do... none in fact, but i just dont like the idea of it...

I know where most things are on my pc, I'm organised... music in the music drive/folder, games in the games drive/folder etc etc....

It seems to be for lazy people or 'home users' who dont know how to properly use a windows operating system...

just my 2c

Bri

Agreed. I'm not unhappy it's available I just won't be installing it myself. It's really not that hard to keep track of most things if you start and maintain a decent file system and backup. The odd random file can be found in other ways...

Hobbes

sixtysix wrote:

downloaded the google desktop-its very impressive but-it will easily find emails to all family members whether pasword protected or not-and despite the fact that my hard drive has been formatted recently it is showing emails posted september 2003! extraordinary stuff but how is it possible?

I find that is probably very doubtful as it only checks existing files on your machine. You probably have them cached somewhere.

They also can only check files you have access to. It won't read password protected files and if you are not admin or other users have locked off their files you can't get them indexed.

It does however index inside zips as far as I know. It is also better then XP search engine as that doesn't even work properly.

Btw, anyone who is worried about thier data being held onto after they delete it really should get a grip. Also this should help you get more paranoid...

http://sillydog.org/mshidden.html

sixtysix

i am telling you i can read my own emails on this machine-posted this week-no password requested, i can also read the family's emails -no password requested-they are not cached
i checked the year old emails -they are cached-but the disk has been formatted since then
be aware

Hobbes

and I am telling you that it is impossible for the google search to index anything that has been formatted.

What is the filename of one of those files?

The only possible way it could happen is you did a quick format on your hard drive, and then had to run a check disk which recovered sectors which contained the old information. Would know this from the filename.

Passwords are only any use if (a) you are not the admin account and (b) the file owner has the file locked to their security. Some programs do not do the latter.

pickarooney

Not sure I understand how it searches e-mail, as in what does it do that the find command in the email program doesn't do?
For the rest, it just sounds like an elaborate slocate command.

RobertFoster

I agree - I think I've used Windows XP search to find a file twice sice I installed it (and I turned off that puppy too - didn't MS learn with clippy?!) so I don't really need to find files as I know where they are

Hobbes

XP Search doesn't work properly. It basically does not index all files. To an average user its not an issue though.

As for GDS..
http://desktop.google.com/privacyfaq.html#protect

Incidently.. type "password" or whatever on your machine you don't want indexed, then click "remove items".

Serbian

Hobbes wrote:

and I am telling you that it is impossible for the google search to index anything that has been formatted.

What is the filename of one of those files?

The only possible way it could happen is you did a quick format on your hard drive, and then had to run a check disk which recovered sectors which contained the old information. Would know this from the filename.

Passwords are only any use if (a) you are not the admin account and (b) the file owner has the file locked to their security. Some programs do not do the latter.

In fairness, you are both right. Hobbes is right, if the information has been wiped off the computer, and never existed during the time Google Desktop was installed, Google Desktop will not find it.

However, if you look at what programs are compatible with the Google Desktop, you'll see that Outlook and Outlook Express are listed there. This means that it is possible for the Google Desktop to index files which are in your current .pst file. That's why it is seeing them. They are just stored with all your other emails.

I read about a guy who has done a more technical study of the implications of Google Desktop and I suppose it's not a bad read. He outlines some of personal privacy implications of this piece of software.

andersde10

I gotta say I love it and am already using it all the time. One great thing is that it indexes my java files, so I can really quickly search for chunks of code I know I have written in the past but have no other chance of finding.