Max's Mewsings

What is the Google Desktop Search?

Google Desktop Search is a tool that looks and feels like the Google we know and love, but it doesn't search the web, it searches your Windows XP or 2000 PC for files and email messages.

So, suppose you know you wrote your local mayor about the raccoons that infest your neighbourhood, but he doesn't seem to remember hearing from you. You decide to send your complaint off to him again, but you cannot remember if you sent him a letter or an email message. Instead of rifling through all of your email messages and all of the files in you're my Documents folder to find that one message or letter you can search for "mayor" through Google desktop and in seconds all of you files and email (grouped by conversation) messages that reference "mayor" are displayed in the format you are accustomed to from Google (including cached versions).

It also incorporates a search of you computer every time you search the web using Google. So if you search "Paul Martin" on Google you'll also get a list of files and emails in which you reference Paul Martin and that reside on your computer.

How does it Work?

After you install Google Desktop on your computer, it indexes the contents of your computer - this can take several hours if you have a lot of files and email messages on your system.

After the indexing, you open a search window by double-clicking the little swirl that Desktop installs in the system tray at the bottom right corner of your screen. The search page looks just like a Google Search page, so you simply type your search as you would on Google. Desktop then generates a list of files and email messages that match you query, complete with a summary and location, just like a Google web search.

Google Desktop search uses the same algorithm that has made Google one of the top web search engines, but instead of applying its index of the entire web, it applies it to an index of your computer. This does not mean, however, that Google knows what is on your computer. The index of your machine resides there and is never accessed by Google. Even when you do a web search, Desktop intercepts the query and runs an identical one on your computer and then merges the results of the web search and its local search to display a results page with links to files on the web and on your computer.

That is all well and good in theory, but in practice it is actually better than I had expected.

The search is fast and accurate.
Before beginning to write up my review I decided to do a little test. I performed a Google Desktop search and standard Windows XP search and timed them. The Google search took less than a second (I wasn't even able to start and stop my stopwatch in time) and delivered 83 results (55 files and 28 emails), all of which were relevant. I bailed out of the XP search after eight minutes. It delivered 383 results (all files since it cannot search email) about 50 of which were relevant.

Desktop's file summary and cache were helpful in finding the right files faster. With an XP search you have to open each file to see its contents.

The program isn't perfect - after all it is still a beta product. There are some shortcomings you should be aware of before you install it though.

• Desktop does not index emails from clients other than Outlook or Outlook Express, so if you use another client you won't be able to it to search your email messages. Google says it is planning on expanding its support for email clients in the future, but there is as yet no timeframe.
• The program will only work on one user account. If you run Windows XP or 2000 you likely have more than one user on your system or have setup your system to accommodate multiple users, but if you install Google Desktop, only one user will be able to use it. This is, in my view, a major flaw. Having seen how effective it is I want the other users on my system to be able to use it. This lack of support for multiple users also prevents it from indexing shared folders like "Share Pictures" or "Shared Documents." Again, Google says it intends to add multi-user support in a future release.
• Google's Desktop works best with Internet Explorer, though some support for other browsers does exist. I used it with Firefox and most of the functionality was there, but it would not search my cached web pages as it would with Internet Explorer.
• I would also like to see an advanced search similar to the one Google uses for its web search. If I know what folder a file is in, for example, it would be nice to see results only from that folder.

It might not be perfect but it is good enough to have already made my life a lot easier.