Raw

Google Desktop Search is how our brains would work if we had photographic memories.

Hee hee, brilliant hyperbole, now come on, what is it really?

It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, computer files, chats, and the web pages you've viewed.

(MS Win2k/XP only)

Remains to be seen what money-making model they have on this, I'd guess advertising. It doesn't yet appear to cover PDFs and PSs, which halves the utility for me, and I've been looking for something like this.

I did install Quaneko only a couple of weeks ago (thanks Joseph) which does pretty much the same job. Only afterwards did I realise that it has one flaw that's a bit of a downer for me - it doesn't recognise network drives (my Win2k install is in the habit of forgetting drive mappings, btw). I periodically dump docs I've downloaded onto a drive on a Linux server, that's the place I need indexing, not my desktop*. Maybe I'll get that when Dashboard/Beagle are more complete (available in Debian unstable?).

I did get as far as the readme for Lucene, it does sound a marvellous piece of kit, but would be significantly more useful if a handful of common-case samples were included, e.g. Desktop Search.

I still reckon the most efficient approach to finding things is not to lose them in the first place ( use velcro).

* current indexing system: when I shift the docs over to the server (ever couple of weeks) I date the directory. If I need to find something on a specific topic, I search my blog for a related post, then find the dir containing the date of that post. A local find gets me the docs I'm looking for. Great system, doesn't work.

(spotter: Andrew)

PS.

I wonder if I can map a gmail drive?

PPS. Response in blogs seems to vary wildly between extremes, even on the same blog in a matter of hours - e.g. yesterday Dave Winer liked Google's Desktop Search so much he invented it, today he uninstalled it.

Write-up by Rael Dornfest

Similar tools: blinkx, Copernik, X1 (costs money)

New Beagle site.

[Danny]