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No Googling My Desktop

It's a nice idea: the Google Desktop is a client-side application you can install on your Windows box and it'll index your files, your incoming and outgoing emails, the web pages you visit, and even your IM conversations. Then you can search through all your stuff whenever you want. Wow, sounds great.

Except for this part:

The Google Desktop full text indexes:
  • Text files, Microsoft Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint presentations living on your hard drive
  • Email handled through Outlook or Outlook Express
  • AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) conversations
  • Web pages browsed in Internet Explorer

Let's see ... I use Thunderbird for email, Trillian Pro for IM, and Firefox for browsing. Guess that pretty much leaves me with another annoying background process indexing my local documents, just like the hell-spawn Microsoft Indexing Service (also amusingly known as FindFast).

I'll take a pass for now. Hey Google, let me know when you've gathered your clothes, put your hair in a pony tail, and started making that Sunday morning "walk of shame" back from Redmond to Mountain View.

Source: O'Reilly Network: Google Your Desktop

Posted by Eric on October 14, 2004 01:46 PM • • Microfeed

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference No Googling My Desktop:

» Google Desktop from Just another anonymous kook
And all of the functions of Google search are available--including the ability to search cached files. This makes for locating a certain sentence, say, in some file you can't possibly remember the name of. Instead of having to find the file first (sa... [Read More]

Tracked on October 14, 2004 05:52 PM

» Great Googly Moogly! from The Centrifuge
Dancing About Architecture: No Googling My Desktop I have to believe that the initial (beta) release of this desktop engine is somewhat limited so that Google can get the proof of concept out there for people to experience somewhat. I'm... [Read More]

Tracked on October 15, 2004 04:54 PM

Comments

The cached aspect sold it for me. And it's really, really fast which makes it even more desirable. Finally! I can find that obscure passage that I remember verbatim but, for the life of me, I just don't remember what the damn filename was!

Posted by: Just another anonymous kook | October 14, 2004 05:47 PM

I installed Google Desktop on a couple occasions. Since I don't use Outlook and since it doesn't index my usual file types (C#), it was kinda right up there w/ System Idle in terms of usefulness ;)

Posted by: Randy Charles Morin | December 9, 2004 10:13 PM

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