Perhaps motivated by groundbreaking
work at Copernic and
Blinkx, and without question hoping to gain first-mover
advantage over Microsoft, Google has released its beta Desktop Search tool. Though the new feature (it cannot properly
be called a "program," as I describe below) is in beta, today represents a confident and smoothly operating release.
Desktop Search embeds on the Google home page for those who have installed it (see the graphic below), on equal footing
with Web, Image, News, and Froogle search.
The download is quick and easy.
The installer avoids requesting that the user shut down running applications—a request universally ignored—and
forthrightly shuts 'em down itself. (Or tries; on my test machine it could not shut down Outlook Express for some
reason.) Then Google gets to work indexing your hard drive. This first crawl is a daunting task in most large-capacity
computers, and Google warns that it could take several hours. The hard-drive crawl is accomplished in the background,
during your computer's idle cycles. The process does not interfere with normal computing. Searches may be initiated
during the indexing process, and Google warns that they are incomplete until the indexing is finished.
After the computer is crawled and the index built, Desktop Search operates like many other Google searches—from the
Google site. In this manner, desktop results are not integrated into Web results as PageRanked items; however the
default setting (which can be turned off) shows the top two Desktop results above Web results when conducting a Web
search, with a link to see the rest. In this way, Desktop results look much like Google News or Froogle results that
are sometimes placed atop Web listings.
Contrary to some reports, Desktop Search does indeed index graphic and music files—by filename. There is no hashing of
media files, and I don't think anyone expected that. But if files are named accurately, finding graphics, music, and
movies is just as easy as finding Word files. Furthermore, you may use the filetype: operator to focus on file
formats such as MP3. As to Gmail integration—that might and might not be added in the future. In the meantime, Gmail
does, of course, utilize its own search engine.
Misinformation is flying as everyone gets acquainted with Desktop Search. this, for example, from Search Engine News:
"At the moment, only files on your primary hard drive (the C: drive for most people) are indexed. Those on additional hard drives won't be searchable."
Untrue, happily. Not only did Google easily index my partitions (C through G), but it easily absorbed my media files on the I drive—an external USB hard drive where I keep my music and movies.
The real question is this: When will Google start incorporating AdWords into Desktop results? And what will the privacy alarmists have to say about that?
THE UPSHOT: Google Desktop Search blows Windows file-searching out of the water and high up on the sand where it lies gasping for life like a beached whale. I cannot imagine a single person who would not prefer Google's system to the Windows system. And that statement, if remotely true, marks a gigantic milestone for Google and its centrality in the computing lives of most people.
1. So I wrote the "misinformation," except it wasn't. Unlike your experience, the tool did not index my additional drives. Google also specifically said that it wouldn't, as well.
Having said this, it's interesting to hear you had success with it doing what they say it wouldn't :)
Posted at 4:42AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Danny Sullivan