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As I get older, I tend more and more to forget where I put my stuff. I used to think of myself as a fairly organized person--that is until I lose track of something and am frantically searching around the house or my hard drive. I really try hard to be organized, really I do.
Having said this, the notion of a new piece of software from Google called Desktop is right on target. It indexes and searches your hard disk with the same speed and agility that Google does for the greater Internet. It works with Microsoft Office documents, e-mails from Outlook and Outlook Express and AOL Instant Messenger conversations.
Google Desktop isn't perfect. If you use a shared computer, then your previous Web history, AOL Instant Messenger conversations and documents you may have thought erased are all still available for inspection. Similarly, Google Desktop creates its own document cache, which is handy for comparing previous versions of your saved files, but problematic if your machine is not secured. This opens up privacy concerns, especially if you are using a shared desktop and don't have physical control over who accesses the computer. Anyone who has physical access could obtain this information. Remember that slow afternoon at the office where you were surfing some, ahem, questionable Web sites? Well, that could be a problem when it shows up in your search results. The best solution? Take advantage of Windows 2000's or XP's multiple accounts capabilities and always logout and lock your machine when it's not in use.
Still, this is a pretty active product space right now, and there are a number of competitors who are aiming carefully here. One is Microsoft, which recently purchased Eric Hahn's Lookout tool (from Lookoutsoft.com) for examining Outlook documents and released beta desktop searching software itself last month. Microsoft's tool requires various bits of pieces of its own browser and e-mail software to work properly, as you might expect.
Google Desktop doesn't index anything other than text files and the Microsoft and AOL IM items mentioned earlier, and only runs on Windows XP and 2000 machines. It also doesn't look inside attachments (Microsoft's desktop search does).
Besides Microsoft, there are search tools from X1.com and Copernic.com, both of which index a large list of file types and can also examine the content of e-mail attachments.
Another major Google Desktop limitation is its scope. Its ability to specify how much content is indexed is pretty crude. You either index all your e-mails or none of them. You can either collect all Word documents or none of them. The only real control you have is on a directory-by-directory basis, which is fine if you have organized your data carefully within directories. But that won't work if you are like most users and have documents scattered all over your hard disk and don't necessarily know where things get stored on your computer once they leave the comfy digs of "My Documents" and venture out into the cold, cruel world of C: .
The more cynical among us, myself included, might stop at this point and say, "Isn't searching your desktop something that the operating system should have done to begin with?" Well, yes and no. The best instance of desktop searching, sans-Google, comes from Apple's Mac OS and Sherlock. And Microsoft is supposedly working on integrating search with the next version of Windows, which should be in a few years or so. Even then, will these OS-based search tools displace Google Desktop? I don't think so. They'll never be able to combine the power of local search with the power of an Internet search engine like Google.
What none of these products has is the integration of desktop and Internet search as in the simple and usable Google display, and that is the not-so-secret sauce here. When you search for something, you can see results from both your own files as well as what is out on the Internet. That has the possibility of changing how we look for content, and it also means it will be harder to lose track of that critical file. Even for this middle-aged semiorganized kind of guy.
Having said this, the notion of a new piece of software from Google called Desktop is right on target. It indexes and searches your hard disk with the same speed and agility that Google does for the greater Internet. It works with Microsoft Office documents, e-mails from Outlook and Outlook Express and AOL Instant Messenger conversations.
Google Desktop isn't perfect. If you use a shared computer, then your previous Web history, AOL Instant Messenger conversations and documents you may have thought erased are all still available for inspection. Similarly, Google Desktop creates its own document cache, which is handy for comparing previous versions of your saved files, but problematic if your machine is not secured. This opens up privacy concerns, especially if you are using a shared desktop and don't have physical control over who accesses the computer. Anyone who has physical access could obtain this information. Remember that slow afternoon at the office where you were surfing some, ahem, questionable Web sites? Well, that could be a problem when it shows up in your search results. The best solution? Take advantage of Windows 2000's or XP's multiple accounts capabilities and always logout and lock your machine when it's not in use.
Still, this is a pretty active product space right now, and there are a number of competitors who are aiming carefully here. One is Microsoft, which recently purchased Eric Hahn's Lookout tool (from Lookoutsoft.com) for examining Outlook documents and released beta desktop searching software itself last month. Microsoft's tool requires various bits of pieces of its own browser and e-mail software to work properly, as you might expect.
Google Desktop doesn't index anything other than text files and the Microsoft and AOL IM items mentioned earlier, and only runs on Windows XP and 2000 machines. It also doesn't look inside attachments (Microsoft's desktop search does).
Besides Microsoft, there are search tools from X1.com and Copernic.com, both of which index a large list of file types and can also examine the content of e-mail attachments.
Another major Google Desktop limitation is its scope. Its ability to specify how much content is indexed is pretty crude. You either index all your e-mails or none of them. You can either collect all Word documents or none of them. The only real control you have is on a directory-by-directory basis, which is fine if you have organized your data carefully within directories. But that won't work if you are like most users and have documents scattered all over your hard disk and don't necessarily know where things get stored on your computer once they leave the comfy digs of "My Documents" and venture out into the cold, cruel world of C: .
The more cynical among us, myself included, might stop at this point and say, "Isn't searching your desktop something that the operating system should have done to begin with?" Well, yes and no. The best instance of desktop searching, sans-Google, comes from Apple's Mac OS and Sherlock. And Microsoft is supposedly working on integrating search with the next version of Windows, which should be in a few years or so. Even then, will these OS-based search tools displace Google Desktop? I don't think so. They'll never be able to combine the power of local search with the power of an Internet search engine like Google.
What none of these products has is the integration of desktop and Internet search as in the simple and usable Google display, and that is the not-so-secret sauce here. When you search for something, you can see results from both your own files as well as what is out on the Internet. That has the possibility of changing how we look for content, and it also means it will be harder to lose track of that critical file. Even for this middle-aged semiorganized kind of guy.