The tool is remarkable for its power yet simplicity. Rather than create a standalone application, Google Desktop Search seamlessly blends into Google itself. Those using the tool see a new "Desktop" link on the Google home page and search results page. Selecting this link brings back results found on their own computers.
In particular, the tool indexes the full text of:
Email within Outlook or Outlook Express (notes, contacts, journal and to do list items are not included, nor are emails in the Deleted Items folder)
Microsoft Word, Excel & PowerPoint files
AOL Instant Messenger chats
Web pages viewed online in Internet Explorer or any HTML file saved to your computer
Plain text files
The tool also indexes the text within the file names of image in JPEG or GIF formats, giving it rudimentary image search capabilities. File names of Adobe Acrobat PDF content and names of some other file types are also indexed. Full text indexing of information in these files is NOT done.
Unlike with Gmail or regular Google searches, ads are not shown with desktop search results or content viewed through desktop search.
Using Google Desktop Search
Google Desktop Search is only for Windows XP or Windows 2000 users -- no news on a Mac version from Google, sorry. Once installed, the application starts indexing information on your computer in the file types it understands. 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.
Indexing is fast and only happens when your computer is idle for 30 seconds or longer. Once the index is built, it is continually updated with changes on the fly. Get a new email? Visit a new web page? All this information is automatically recorded and made searchable within seconds.
"Our goal for the application is to have it behave as if you had photographic memory of what's on your computer," Mayer said.
How to search? A little swirly Google Desktop Search icon is shown in your Windows taskbar. Double-click on this (or right-click, then choose Search), and an Internet Explorer window will open with the Google home page on it -- or at least, what looks like the Google home page.
In reality, you're getting the Google Desktop Search home page. This is a page hosted on your computer, the home page of a local web server created to dish up what Google Desktop Search has indexed and found.
Do a search on this page, and by default, you'll search the contents of your desktop. A combined list of everything found will be shown, with little icons indicating if something is a web page, an email and so on. You'll also be shown a count in the reverse bar under the search box indicating the total matches, the number of email matches, file matches, chat matches and web history matches.
Each count is also a link, and clicking on them will narrow your search to one type of data. In other words, click on the count for emails found, and you'll be shown only matching email messages.
Phrase searching with quotes and term exclusion using the - sign, as on Google itself, is supported.
Awesome Automatic Caching
Any item listed will initially have a "1 cached" link after its file name. Similar to the Google page cache feature, this lets you see a copy of the file as Google has indexed it, without actually opening the file itself. So if you have a spreadsheet file, you see a copy of the spreadsheet without having to open Excel.
Each time you view something, a snapshot of what you've seen is created. Did you visit the same web page several times in a month? A copy of the page each time you visited is made. The "1 cached" link will change to reflect the number of copies recorded.
This is a fantastic way to keep a record of exactly what you've seen on the web and how you saw it, over time. On many occasions, I've wanted to go back and see how a web page may have looked a few days ago, a few weeks ago and so on. Tools like the Internet Archive have sometimes helped, but not always. The new tool Seruku is another solution, but at a small cost.
Now Google Desktop Search makes it easy to painlessly preserve your own archive of what you've seen and for free. It becomes, as Gary Price wished for last week, a "TiVO for the web."
In addition, the cached copies of your local files provides some automatic backup insurance. Make a change to a file, then wish you hadn't? Visiting your cached copies may help you get back some of what was modified. The data won't be in the original document format -- with spreadsheets, it can especially look weird, but some of what you grab may help.
Google Integration & Search Memory
Searching your desktop can be done by opening the special Google Desktop home page, as described above. However, I suspect many people will simply end up searching via the regular Google home page. I've certainly been doing that, in my testing so far.
That's part of the elegance of the tool. Once installed, the Google home page will show a new "Desktop" link. This effectively integrates your desktop into Google itself.
Do a web search, and any matching content from your own computer will be shown above the regular search results, in a OneBox display, similar to how news, product, local and book search results are shown. Any one of these OneBox display may also still appear below any desktop search results.
Should you dislike this integration, you can hide desktop results on a one-time basis by clicking on the small Hide link within the display. Using the Desktop Preferences option, you can also shut integration off permanently.
The integration means you can easily spot any of your own emails or data files that might also match something you seek from across the web. I haven't found that too helpful so far. But the ability to have relevant web pages you've previously viewed be bundled as part of Google web search results is fantastic. Its helps you find new things you want to view plus recover things you've seen before.
I've written recently that search memory features like this at a9 have gotten me to use that service more. Similar features released recently by Ask Jeeves and Yahoo are also compelling. Overall, I was beginning to seriously dislike Google for not having them.
Now Google's gained some search memory of its own. a9, Ask Jeeves and Yahoo's tools are more mature and feature-rich, but Google Desktop Search is a good stopgap for Google. It makes my searches there more personal, more useful and importantly, helps tie me in more to the service. In addition, I get the ability to scan for files and email on my computer.
The integration feels so comfortable that it makes me think desktop search tools from Google's competitors will have to have similar integration. A desktop search tab may become de rigueur.
From Physical To Virtual Desktop
Google Desktop Search is a further move toward what I speculated might happen in my Welcome To The Google Desktop? article back when Gmail was released.
In it, I suggested that Google might cause us to reconsider what we consider to be our desktop. Rather than it being tied to a physical computer, our desktop could go virtual, with files located on Google (or competitors), accessible to use wherever we are.
Google Desktop Search doesn't physically get us there. Our files still reside on our computers. But metaphorically, those running it now have their desktops moved to Google. There it is -- a little link right above the search box. Your desktop, on Google.
Forget the idea of Google as operating system replacement. This isn't a move that locks you into a particular platform for running programs and applications, as an operating system does. This goes beyond that. It locks you into something more important, your data -- and perhaps prepares you for trusting Google (or others) more with that.
Consider that down the line, Google might offer to mirror its searchable copy of your desktop data on its own site. That would be useful. If you're away from home, recovering all your data would be as easy as getting to a browser and searching on Google. Your desktop could become wherever Google is -- or its competitors, if they follow suit.
While Google may seem in the lead on this, others may not be far behind. The Yahoo desktop search product that's rumored might involve storage of files with Yahoo itself. LookSmart's Furl service recently expanded web page storage to 5 gigabytes and envisions allowing file storage and searching. Lycos UK last month launched an online drive service for file storage. And Microsoft itself has a long-standing Stuff I've Seen research project that could potentially expand this way or be bundled into the desktop tool planned for release later this year.
A Wish List
I've been running Google Desktop Search for nearly two days, and already it's proven itself a keeper to me. Having said this, and bearing in mind it's still a beta release, I've already got a wish list.
Most annoying so far is that you can only see 10 results at a time. Though the tool has a Desktop Preferences option, that doesn't yet include an option to increase the number of results seen at one time. Google said there's nothing to announce about potential changes to this yet.
Also missing is an advanced search page. On that, it would be nice to have drop down boxes as with Google itself letting you limit searches to particular file types, phrases or especially date ranges.
For example, getting back a long list of matching emails, then having to use the result page numbers at the bottom of the results list to browse to a particular date is a pain.
You can use some of Google's search syntax to get around this. To narrow to file type, use the filetype command. For example, this:
cars filetype:email
would bring back only email matches with the word cars mentioned. A list of known file types we've tested to date and found work are:
Word: filetype:word or filetype:doc
Excel: filetype:excel or filetype:xls
PowerPoint: filetype:powerpoint or filetype:ppt
Text: filetype:text or filetype:txt
Email: filetype:email
Chat: filetype:chat
Web History/HTML Files: filetype:web or filetype:html
Images: filetype:jpg or filetype:gif
Acrobat: filetype:pdf
Windows Media: filetype:wma or filetype:wmv
MP3: filetype:mp3
For email, chat and web history, you can also narrow by clicking on the count numbers, as described above. As for images, Acrobat and other files, keep in mind that only text in the file names will be matched, not any meta data or actual text contained within the files.
Images, Acrobat, Windows Media and MP3 files are also not officially supported by the product as searchable content. While I did find it capturing some of this content on my computer, the bulk of it was not retrieved. Why some but not all of it was found is unclear, especially given that the index process appeared to have completed OK. But since this isn't even promised, I can't complain much.
Google, of course, purchased the Picasa photo indexing solution earlier this year. Perhaps it will be that Google Desktop Search will evolve some integration with that in the future.
Google Toolbar/Deskbar integration would be nice. At the moment, I can use the Google Toolbar to specifically search for just images, news, shopping, the web and so on. But desktop search isn't an option. Google says this may come for future versions.
A real personal wish is for indexing of content of compressed/zip files. I constantly zip up data -- right now, none of that gets indexed by the tool.
I desperately want the search memory features to mature. I want this tool -- or some other system -- to keep track of what I actually have searched for and track that in association with pages I've found. So far, Yahoo's implementation of these types of features are the best I've seen (but those at a9 and Ask Jeeves are great as well).
Finally, password protection and encryption of data compiled by Google Desktop is important. I hope that will be added soon. More on why that's important and other search privacy issues are covered in the companion to this article: A Closer Look At Privacy And Desktop Search. Google also provides more information about privacy issues in its Privacy Policy and Privacy FAQ.
In Conclusion
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