Google Desktop: Just what you need.

Taken the cool new release from Google for a spin for the last three days. It's a very use­ful util­ity, depra­cat­ing pretty much all other desk­top index­ing util­i­ties I've asso­ci­ated in the past.

I've spent the bet­ter part of this week­end tak­ing Google's desk­top for a spin. Although it's tech­ni­cally a beta, it has turned out to be a very use­ful util­ity I'd rec­om­mend to just about any­one with a Win­dows OS, depra­cat­ing pretty much all other desk­top index­ing util­i­ties I've asso­ci­ated in the past (e.g., 80:20 Retriever, Isys, etc).

Instal­la­tion

As you'd expect from any­thing done by Google, the tool installed quickly and with­out any has­sles on both my office as well as home machine. A col­or­ful icon is auto­mat­i­cally installed on my Win­dows sta­tus bar in the right hand bot­tom cor­ner, which I can click at any time to acti­vate the search page. The search page is launched as a local­host (local server) so you may need to allow it to act as a server if you use the likes of Zone Alarm. That done, it's a cinch, and looks a bit like this in your famil­iar browser:

Index­ing

Now for the index­ing. At the out­set, the index­ing process of read­ing all rec­og­nized files (basi­cally doc­u­ments and email) starts auto­mat­i­cally. You can per­son­al­ize what file types you wish to include in this index.

The index­ing is impres­sively fast. I have 80 GB hard­disk, for instance, about 30 or so of which is occu­pied by doc­u­ments from roughly the last five years, plus email that matches this heft. I can see the num­ber of doc­u­ments and emails indexed in the main page of my Google Desk­top (which I can start by click­ing on Google's icon in my sta­tus bar, as men­tioned above) and I had my entire disk pretty much done in 4 – 5 hours. The index­ing does not eat up into your mem­ory, I kept check­ing in the processes, it's CPU usage is always 0. I guess index­ing hap­pens when I'm away from my machine.

Search­ing

Now for the search itself. It's super impres­sive! Once your doc­u­ments are into the index, the search is blis­ter­ingly fast, almost instant to the human eye. Imag­ine that level of access to my entire machine, its a no-brainer of a tool.

Most com­monly used file types are recognized:

What's Nifty

• The results appear in a snap. Most addic­tive for me is the Out­look email search, it eas­ily matches (and in some case beats) my Isys:Email.Search add-on, which I had come to dearly love too.
• The index is auto­mat­i­cally added to when you send or receive new email, or create/edit your doc­u­ments. You don't need to bat an eye­lid. How cool is that.
• I can see con­tex­tu­ally related emails to an Out­look result by click­ing the "View in Thread" option for that search result, much like Gmail's inter­face. Plus, I also have an option to open the selected mes­sage in Out­look. Brilliant!
• If the result is a Pow­er­point or Word doc­u­ment and you're in no mood to launch those bulky apps, you can see the Cached ver­sion of your doc­u­ment, with only the text, sim­i­lar to gen­eral Google functionality.
• Not inter­ested in doc­u­ments at all? The result allows you to select only emails, or only documents.

Now if only I could have some way to search through my audio and video stash, I'd be a happy camper. Bet it's not too far. Give this superb tool a try, highly recommended.