Oct 15 2004

Desktop Search Goes Google

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Those of you who know me know that I’m very leery about downloading software, tools or programs onto my computer. I simply hate the clutter that is created by installing new programs, not to mention slowing down computer performance as well as the possibility of causing windows to crash more often. However, after reading about Google’s desktop search I decided to give it a try.

My first reaction upon hearing that Google was going the desktop search route was skepticism. After all, allowing Google to index the contents of my computer means that my information is now accessible to someone other than myself. Granted, Google, and I assume other desktop search programs state that my information will not be made available publicly, I still know its out there and available to “someone”.

Putting those reservations aside, I downloaded and installed The new desktop search feature from Google. I’ve only played around with it for a few minutes but so far I like what I see. Once installed, an icon appears in the status tray of my start bar. Double clicking on this brings up a desktop search browser page. From here I tried a simple search for “links”. I’m not looking for anything specific here, just trying to test functionality.

Google returned 673 items that fit: 11 emails from MS Outlook, 92 files from MS Word, Excel, Powerpoint or .txt files, 0 chats (I don’t us AOL) and 570 web pages which I have recently viewed. One of my favorite features are the links at the top that let me sort specifically by one of the categories above. For instance if I know I’m looking for an email, I simply click the email link. This removes all the other search results.

I also like the fact that I can look up a cached version of a file. This is handy if I saved a file after I accidentally deleted something important. I can go back and retrieve the cached versions. I have not seen this for myself but I believe multiple cached versions will be available.

Back to my test, I know what I’m looking for is a web page so I click the web history link. a quick scan of the results shows me that there are many pages I simply know my information does not exist. In this case my recent viewings of “Ain’t It Cool News” are not applicable. So I refine my search to “links -ain’t”. Unfortunately by refining my search it defaults back to “all” files so I have to click “web history” again, but this time all the web pages for Ain’t It Cool News are no longer in the results.

Now I’m down to 60 results (gosh, do I visit Ain’t It Cool that much?!!) but know that I’m also not looking for anything on my own website so I narrow down my search to “links -ain’t -pole”. This narrows now my search to about 40 documents. I can now sort these by most recent or by relevance, another nice feature.

Overall I’m very impressed with Google Desktop. I’m sure it will come in handy as I try to retrieve old deleted emails as I tend not to keep such things around for any length of time and often delete things I wish I hadn’t, or wishing to retrieve information from news sites I’ve already viewed but never saved.

The one thing I cannot get to work is the option to “Show Desktop Search results on Google Web Search result pages”. I should be able to go to Google home page and searches will integrate web results with my desktop results. I simply cannot get this feature to work as no desktop results appear.