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.