Yet another blog post about Google Desktop
Yeah yeah, i know, everyones talking about it. I'm almost sick of reading about it already - damn there's a heap of info available already for it.
I should start with the obligatory - Google released a desktop indexer and searcher.
Right now that that's out of the road, i've got two main things i want to say.
First, the good.
Man, this is great. It indexes so much stuff off your local harddrive and you search it just like you were on the google website. When you search normal google, it integrates the desktop search too. But the ain thing is the speed. Google web searches are lightning fast - so too are the local searches. At work i have a 1.8 gig celeron, it's ok, but not super fast for most of it's work. But this thing happliy indexed 25000 different items and searches on them happen almost instantaneously. Wow.
Now, the bad. Well, not bad, just my wishlist.
I do realise this is a beta product. I know they're going to be making many improvements to it over time. I'm not upset or disappointed at the features that i want that aren't there yet. I say this, because too many times i've seen people getting righteous and angry at things that 'should' be happening, when the damn things a beta product. :)
So here's what i want (and i wouldn't be surprised if most of them came true) (touch wood)
- Integration with the other google desktop products. The google toolbar detects when i do a normal google search and populates it's text box with your search term - i'd like this to happen with the desktop search too. And the google toolbar needs an option to search the desktop.
- Search filtering. When i do a normal search, i can add a site filter (site:msdn.microsoft.com, for example). To filter by folder would be nice too.
- It doesn't index images or mp3s. No big deal, and you can't really expect it to do it - currently it does index the filename tho. But for mp3s, i'd like it to index the ID3 tag too, so i can search for album names and stuff.
- It has simple plain text support, but it doesn't index all plain text files. This is my ultimate - if it could index all my source code, that would be fantastic. I need to check where i called a function? Search for the function name. I think of so many benefites to having searchable source. And it does index C and C++ source code i noticed, but no .net stuff.
- It looks like it binds to the loopback device for the desktop search page - so you have to connect to 127.0.0.1. This is nice and secure, and i can understand why they did it. But if you could configure the bindings, then i could let the guy who sits next to me at work open a browser to my desktop search page, and he could search my source code...or find my mp3s :)
- There's no multiuser support yet. google acknowledges this on their faq. they need to deal with this. One concern with that is if my login has everything indexed (with my email) and someone else has everything indexed (with their email) have all the public documents been indexed twice?
- People complain about no support yet for the mozilla/firefox history. I can't say i care, I don't use it *laughs* i'm happy in my IE world.
- I'd really like to see many of the google searches be combined. One search page that returned a result list from the web, newsgroups, my local files, and my gmail all in one hit. Normally i'd search all them anyway looking for answers.
Oh, and one more thing. How cool would it be if google released an rss reader, and the blog entries you read in it are indexed into the desktop search? I like that idea.
This thing just rocks. Well done google!