or "Honey! Have you Seen My Keys, Glasses, Tivo Remote?"
by Mike Banks Valentine
© October 17, 2004
Google Desktop Search Software can't find your lost keys or
tell you where you left the Tivo remote control, or that your
glasses are on top of your head, where you left them. But the
beta software from Google Labs is nothing short of mandatory for
those with more emails, Word documents, Powerpoint, Excel and
PDF files than they know what to do with. That's me.
New fixtures in our lives can become near necessities pretty
quickly. You know, like the Tivo remote when you want to skip
repetitive loud jingles in commercials. I've even begun to start
reaching for that Tivo remote out of habit when I've missed an
important news item on the car radio! Wait, Back up!
I'll grin as I catch myself doing this, while wondering why
that Tivo functionality isn't built into our new car radio. My
wife has told me she does the same thing. Now I believe I've been
just as spoiled & smitten by Google Desktop Search!
Once you install the software at http://desktop.google.com/
and try it a few times, you'll be hooked. In fact, if you're like
me, you'll wonder how you got along without it! My wife is less
impressed, but she also said to me, "I KNOW where stuff is on
my computer!" That's because she only has emails and occasional
Word documents and photos on her machine and knows where each
of them are stored.
Those of us who use the computer all day long, every working
day, have multiple folders, long lists of emails, downloaded files,
emailed receipts from online purchases, ebooks, PDF's, spreadsheets,
client information and files, PowerPoint files, and web pages
we've visited while doing work all day long.
Have you tried using the Windows built-in search lately? The
search function is accessed by clicking the "Start" button, where
you see the option "Search" and then options including "For Files
or Folders", then "On The Internet", then "Using Microsoft Outlook"
and "For People". Clearly, you must know where your lost item
MIGHT be & decide to search only there.
Your choices expand and you choose where to look from among
MORE places your lost item MIGHT be found so Windows knows where
to look. Choose from among "Look for Files or Folders Named" and
then "Containing Text", the infuriating "Look In" choices "My
Documents" and "Desktop" and "My Computer" and "Local Hard Drives
(C)", and inexplicably - "Browse"! Might as well do that first
by opening every folder and browsing!
My experience has been that I don't remember where it is, and
THAT is why I need to search for it! And most often, Windows search
function fails to find what I've misplaced - BECAUSE I CAN'T REMEMBER
WHERE IT IS, SO CAN'T TELL WINDOWS WHERE TO LOOK FOR IT! That
is certainly NOT a useful search tool.
Google has completely resolved this problem and eliminated my
frustration with Google Desktop Search Software. It's a 400k application
that takes less than a minute to download on a dial-up modem!
This powerful tool is tiny, fast and nothing short of amazing
in it's functionality.
The first thing you see after installation is completed is a
note in your browser window that says "Indexing has Begun" or
something similar. I tried to use Google Desktop Search to find
the cached page of that window, but it didn't turn up. I went
to their "Help" pages and found that it's because I am using FireFox
Browser and "Web pages which you view in Firefox aren't added
to your Desktop Search index". They apologize and promise future
Mozilla Firefox support.
But Desktop Search does show you cached copies of every web
page you've visited in Explorer and search result pages show the
Title of each page, along with a thumbnail sized image of those
pages to the right of those results!
But that is only the beginning. I did a search for a phrase
from an email to a new client as my first search in Google Desktop
Search. A search for three words brought up several of the emails
we had exchanged, a (Word) contract with my client, cached web
page with thumbnail image and yes, the email I was looking for
was among the results. Very impressive and FAST!
The results page has links across the top including "All - 3
emails - 2 files - 1 chats - 6 web history" with the number of
items that match each type of result in Google Desktop Search.
If you click one of these links it shows results only in that
file type or email results or web pages. All results display as
"Cached" in browser windows, including Word documents, so that
each software needn't open for that document! I love it!
If you click the "emails" link from those in the top of the
Desktop Search links, it lists only the emails that turned up
with the search words in them, then click on any one of those
results and it shows the email in the browser window. At the bottom
of that page it shows "< Older | Newer >" links to see them by
date, then "View Entire Thread (2)" and "Reply", "Reply to All",
"Forward", "Compose", "View In Outlook" links, which to me, makes
Microsoft look awful! (Again, sigh . . .)
Why? That functionality is not even an option in Outlook or
Explorer - even with the so-called integration that has courts
trying to separate Windows software bits out of the operating
system, and Microsoft claiming that would harm Windows! Google
provides a powerful little bit of code that does all this as a
stand alone tool which outperforms Windows search tools in speed
and functionality in a 400k application! FOR FREE!
Google Desktop Search even performs searches in the background
when you search the web with Google online and inserts their odd
little Desktop Search logo beside the first result on the search
results page - which is a result from your computer! The first
time I saw this, I was unaware of how it was done and found it
quite disturbing that my private hard drive was indexed by Google
for all to see!
I looked closely at the result and clicked the "About" link
beside my personal email deion in the Google Web Results page.
It took me to a Google page that set my mind at ease by telling
me that "These combined results can be seen only from your own
computer; your computer's content is never sent to Google (or
anyone else)." Whew! It's described in detail at: <http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=10996
>
On top of all this magical stuff, Google online search pages
now have another link on the page labled "Desktop" right next
to the Froogle link because it is inserted by the browser if you
have Google Desktop Search software installed on your own machine!
(This browser integration does work in Firefox.)
There's a cute little item at the bottom of the Desktop Search
that tells you "Searching 5,834 items" which references their
"Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages" online, and seems downright
charming by comparison. If Google can search billions of pages
online, then surely my few thousand files are nothing for them
on my comparatively tiny machine, eh?
This all adds up to an incredibly fascinating bit of software
that I simply cannot live without, now that I've seen it work.
I can't wait until Google turns their attention to helping me
find my lost keys! Results page shows "Black jeans, laundry basket
- Cached 3pm Sunday - 6 keys"
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Mike Banks Valentine practices Search Engine Optimism at: http://SEOptimism.com
and operates a search engine blog where you can read this article
with active links to web resources <http://realityseo.com/2004/10/google-desktop-search-versus-microsoft.html>
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