Review of Google desktop search
From the moment I read the Slashdot post, I've been playing with the Google desktop search utility (http://desktop.google.com). Even though it's in beta, I'm amazed at the amount of sheen and polish. Make no mistake- this is a typical Google piece of work. Thoughtful, usable and takes care of all the small details. Let's get in, shall we?
Download and installation
I'm amazed at the size of the download - its only 440 Kb. Its half the size of the Google toolbar! If this had been a Microsoft utility, it would have been some 20 MB with some 5 dependencies and a service pack required. Download went pretty smoothly and quickly - though I downloaded it at the peak slashdotting moment. At that time, there must have been thousands of concurrent downloads streaming out from Google's (or Akamai's?) servers.
Installation went pretty smoothly for me. One annoying thing is that it insists on closing all your open Office, IE and Firefox windows(probably the first time I've seen an application ask to shut down Firefox). It didn't shutdown Outlook properly for me as my Outlook was in the throes of some operation and I had to manually give Outlook the boot.
After installing, it runs in your notification area (or system tray, if you prefer to call it that).
Some people have reported issues with the installation - in particular, some versions of the ISA client conflict with it. Google says this is a known issue in the knowledge base. Also, this utility needs 1 GB of free space in your system drive to install - this is where it stores its index.
First time indexing
Once it has finished installing, it starts building its index for the first time. Here's a problem - I've been letting it index for over 12 hours and it still hasn't finished for me. This is even after leaving the computer on overnight. The help docs say that it indexes when the system is idle - I wish there were some option which said "Index now and CPU usage be damned!". I want it to index but I'm not able to force it to which is a tad frustrating.
In its current release, GDS indexes the following items
- Outlook/ Outlook Express email
- Office documents/text files
- AOL chat
- Web history/cache
I like the way they integrate into Outlook - very unobtrusive and don't make much ado.Typical Google ,actually. Its surprising that they don't do MSN chat archives as its in a simple XML format too. Yahoo chat might be another story altogether as they encrypt their chat history. And all your Firefox users might be a tad disappointed - this thing doesn't see your Firefox history yet. But I'm pretty sure this'll be fixed in a future version.
Search
Search is done in a couple of ways. I have to admit that I never thought Google would take this approach - I was so stuck on clunky search UIs that I forgot the KISS principle. For those of you who don't know this yet, here's the kicker - this thing integrates with your normal Google usage.
When you search for a term in Google, you see the results from the local file system at the top - which you can then expand, drill down on,etc.
Search is a mixed experience - most of it is very good and very relevant as you would expect from Google. They seem to give a lot of importance to the date (as they don't have Pagrerank on the local file system).
I like how fast search is. I find myself viewing the cached version of my emails rather than wait for the elephantine Outlook to be roused from its slumber to view the mail. Oh yes- Google Desktop Search does the same kind of caching as the web version - which is a rather cool feature.
With that description out of the way, here are my thoughts
Things I like:
- The fact that it has Google written all over it.Unlike X1 or Lookout which are heavy and clunky, this is simplicity personified. And it fast. Really fast. But then, what else would you expect from Google?
- It handles all the common file formats with Google promising to throw in more. MSN Messenger not being recognized is a bit of a pain but I'm sure this will be fixed soon And I'd love PDF searching abilities too.
- It integrates right into your Google search. You don't have to do anything special to use it. I suspect Google wants users to think 'Let's Google it' whenever they want to search for anything, be it stuff on the web, their mail,their documents, their misplaced keys. Whatever you want to find in the future, Google is probably what you need to use.
- It does Outlook search better than Lookout can. And since it caches the text, you can now search your Outlook mail without Outlook open. And read it without Outlook open as well. Too cool!
- When it finds any result from your IE cache, it displays a thumbnail of the webpage right next to the search result. I wonder how they do this -my guess is that they plug into the Explorer thumbnail interfaces and get an image generated for them that way. And just to put the Google icing on the cake, the generated image is a PNG too
- It is flexible just like the traditional Google search. You have options for searching for specific filetypes by using the filetype: syntax and you can choose which folders you want left alone. Before privacy freaks get all worked up about Google indexing their life - relax. You can turn off specific file formats, paths,etc.
- And my favorite thing. It just works. And it doesn't get in your way. For those of you who are into UI designing, you would know that this is a huge compliment to their UI engineers.
Things I don't like that much
Well, the software is in beta and Google will probably address most of these issues before the release.
- I want an option of installing it some other drive as most people don't have much space on their system drive.
[Update: You can change where it stores its index by storing the data_dir variable stored in the registry]
- I really think that searching through web history should be better. I think the interface for this requires some thinking - for I usually get too many web history results cluttering up the first page of my search. I'm not sure what the exact solution would be - but this require a slight bit of work
- I would like the ability to add filetypes. Taking this idea along, it would be perfect if Google released a plug-in API for this(I'm sure they use one internally). For right now, I have to use plain old grep to search through all my source code in c# , Vb or Python which is a huge pain. Plugins and a SDK would be great.
Final thoughts
Rarely have I spent several hours on my comp just searching, but this is what GDS has made me do. One thing common to all Google software is that you feel 'good' on using it - be it Gmail or Picasa(Orkut is a black sheep though). I searched for a friend's name and found the name in some files which I had forgotten about. If I were Microsoft I would be worried - for when Microsoft were chasing Netscape, they were chasing an almost stationary target. But Google keeps pushing the bar higher and higher. And I'm not sure why they bought Lookout - but frankly, Lookout can't hold a candle to this.
The search wars have officially begun - and Google has brought the battle right to Microsoft's home turf - the desktop. With people like AOL and Yahoo also developing their own search software, finding stuff is gonna become a lot of fun.
As a friend of mine (http://myxp.blogspot.com) put it last night - "Google desktop would probably make that search dog run away with its tail between its legs".
And its about time too.
Scoble - are you sure it isn't too late for your search champs?