Google Desktop: The Next Battleground?
on 10.15.04, 02:16pm in Uncategorized • comments (4)
I’ve resisted as long as possible posting anything about Google Desktop, which was released to the world yesterday (as every other blogger has posted). Scott Hanselmen (as usual) has a great post that talks about some of the more technical aspects of it.
Here’s the basics: Google’s Desktop will search Outlook / Outlook Express, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, AOL Instant Messenger logs, Internet Explorer and text files on your local box.
One thing that I’m not terribly excited about (which Scott likes) is that it runs as a local webserver on port 4664. I did some quick tests yesterday, and it does appear to be locked down to ‘localhost’ (which is good, you really don’t want another machine on the network googling your desktop), but I’ve always been a bit leery though of loading up my box with mini-servers, I just don’t feel as safe.
It’s going to be interesting now that full desktop searching seems to be the next ‘holy grail’ for software. Part of me wonders if this is because the price of mass storage has fallen (heck, you can get a 200gig drive for $69 these days), that our computers have become so overloaded with ’stuff’? Or is it in response to WinFS getting pushed out?
Here are some other desktop search tools that provide alternatives to Google Desktop:
- Stuff I’ve Seen - developed by MS Research, SIS is a prototype tool for scanning email, attachments, files, web pages, etc.
- Lookout - we recently acquired these guys, and I’ve been using it for awhile now. Did you know that lookout doesn’t only scan outlook items, but anything in the file system? If you go into the ‘options’ dialog, you can add any folder, the desktop, etc.
Jim (October 15, 2004 @ 3:15 pm)
The biggest complaint that I have is that full desktop searching may be the holy grail, but that’s not what Google Desktop Search is doing. Instead it ignores a LOT of stuff on my computer!
As I posted on my own site yesterday, I’ve been very interested to see how Google’s solution turned out and was disappointed to see how few file formats it actually searches/displays. Where is the support for image files? Music? Alternate email and web browsers? Other popular programs?
If you live just in Outlook and Word, it seems to do a great job. But that’s just not my reality. I use a lot of software tools and want a desktop search tool that doesn’t ignore half my hard drive.
Even more frustrating is that the unbearably slow, clunky and limited search feature built into XP does one basic thing that almost every new desktop search tool, including Google, skips: it indexes the *filenames* of all files even when it can’t read their contents. Since I use XP’s long filenames to always include at least one keyword, I can find all sort of files that other search tools ignore. It seems like a minor tweak for products like Google that would at least meet users of other programs halfway.
Two alternatives I’ve found interesting are X1 and Copernic Desktop Search. Unforunately they have their own set of warts. X1 supports a long list of file types, but seems very resource hungry. Copernic Desktop Search is free, but supports a shorter list of file formats and makes you choose to search by category (files, music, images, web) with no choice to search across all categories at once.
So far I still haven’t found a perfect tool for my needs.
- Jim
Mark (October 15, 2004 @ 4:30 pm)
I hope this spurs Microsoft to make the search feature built into Windows XP better. Most of it is done they just need to make the end user experience better. Windows XP comes with a service called the Content Indexing Service. It’s the same service (as far as I can tell) that comes with the server products. (Windows 2000/Windows 2003). It will index your entire hard drive. As far as I know it can’t specifically index email, though if I recall correctly it can do something with Exchange server and SQL server.
Also, you can (and people do) write custom filters so that Content Indexing Service can know how to parse addition file types. PDF files for example. C# files. etc. There are tons of filters out there.
So try it - go to your Administrative Tools, click Services, and enable/start Content Indexing. Come back later (it indexes in the background during idle times too) and give it a try.
Oh wait - how do you actually search it? Well, that’s where the whole thing falls down. Supposedly you can enable the built in search feature to use it. I have NEVER gotten this to work - and I’ve tried. Oh how I’ve tried. The whole search your own PC slower than the Internet thing has been a pet peeve of mine for a while now.
That’s not to say that you can’t search the content - you can, and here’s how: Click Start, Run, type MMC, and click Ok. Next, click File, then Add/remove snap-in. Click the Add button. Scroll the list of things you can add until you find the Indexing Service. Click it and then click Add. Click Finish. Click Close. Click Ok. Now, click the plus sign in front of Indexing Service on Local Machine. Click the plus sign next to one of the next things that shows up - I have multiple catalogs so I can’t describe the default. Finally, click Query the Catalog. Now you’re ready to search! Wasn’t that easy? (Sarcasm).
Still… try it. See how fast it is? It’s not bad. It’s built in. It’s been built in for years. You just can’t access it very easily.
So to reiterate, I hope Google’s desktop spurs Microsoft to fix its usability problem. The rest of the technology seems to be done already.
Jason (October 15, 2004 @ 7:21 pm)
I like the Google search feature, but am curious about the one you referred to last, LookOut. Google doesn’t search Network drives, does LookOut? I’ll have to check.
I asked Google if I could share my index of files with other users on the network, and they affirmed what you said, that the server is locked down to the local host. I tried to change it using a Hex editor, just to see if it could be done, but it looks to be encrypted so that’s pretty safe.
I feel the same way you feel about all these servers running on my machine. that’s one reason I really love XP SP2.
Jason
Steve (October 15, 2004 @ 9:02 pm)
Yup - Lookout will do network drives. You just need to go to Options-Add Files then select your drive.