Google Desktop: A Different Kind of Search Welcome to Sub-Two-Second Desktop Searches Gerry Blackwell
It is sometimes hard to remember that Google, the most dominant and popular Web search engine, burst into online consciousness only six years ago. In that short time, the company's name has practically become part of our everyday language.
When I was young and asked my father a tough question or one that required too long an answer, he'd tell me to look it up in the family encyclopedia. I tell my daughter, "Google it."
Taking its powerful search technology in a slightly different direction, Google can now do for the information stored on your PC what it does for the Web. Google Desktop, a browser-based Windows application — currently in beta testing and available as a free download — enables you to perform full-text searches of your hard drive as fast as, or faster than, Google searches the Web.
We're not talking about just searching Web pages cached on your hard drive, either; Google Desktop also finds e-mail messages, documents, and instant message (IM) threads. And it uses the same familiar interface as the Google Web search page.
The company suggests that Google Desktop will change the way in which people use their computers. Instead of manually organizing information in Windows folders and subfolders and in applications such as Outlook, they'll be able to find anything, anywhere on their computer, in seconds.
Google Desktop is certainly a breakthrough, but the company's talk of a paradigm shift may be slightly overstating the case.
Two-Second Search
I've had the program installed on my system for several weeks and find that I'm using it more every day. Using Windows or Word search utilities for keyword searches of my large archive of Word documents takes several minutes. With Google, the search rarely lasts even two seconds. And, at the same time, Google turns up other relevant content that I might not have thought of searching.
Google Desktop organizes search results in useful ways. By default it presents a chronological listing of all hits, with little icons beside each to identify the type of content — and images of the cached Web pages. For a bit of customization, you can click a link at the top of the page to show only mail or only documents of a particular type.
I especially like how the program shows e-mail threads in chronological order so you see the messages and responses in sequence. You can also set up Outlook to display search results this way, but it takes some doing.
Find it Fast — This page may look familiar, but this Google search takes place on your computer to help you find your files fast.
I do have one tiny quibble with the way Google Desktop works. When you click on a Word or other Microsoft Office file in a list of search results, it launches the program in which the document was created and opens the document — which is exactly what you want. But for Outlook messages, it only displays the text of the message as a Web page.
This doesn't help much if you want to reply to or forward the message. And if you clip text from one of these pages and then paste it into a document, you'll have to strip out the hard line breaks. It's a small complaint, and in fairness, it's probably unavoidable because of the way Outlook and Outlook Express store messages
Google says Desktop will eventually be able to search for more than it can now. In the meantime, the range of file types the product can find is impressive and may be all many users will ever need: Outlook and Outlook Express mail; AOL Instant Messaging chats; Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and text files; and your Web history.
Google isn't saying much at this point about which additional types of files the product will eventually be able to search or when it will add new file types — except that full-text searching of PDF (Adobe Acrobat) files is on the list. It's also not clear when the company expects to complete the beta testing, though a Google spokesperson assured us the company had "no plans to charge for the product."
