Is Google Taking Over My Computer?
Posted: Thursday, October 14, 2004 9:44 PM
by
dan
It has been rumoured for months, but finally today it was announced that google had entered the Desktop Search business with
Google Desktop. Anyone that has ever used Microsoft Windows Search knows it is a big pain, and it is slow and the indexing is pretty bad. Needless to say I've been looking forward to the newest addition to the
Google family, and I downloaded it as soon as I heard.
Right off the bat I had a bit of a problem with the install not working because I had Microsoft Firewall Client Version 3 installed, instead of version 4. Even though this is disabled it would not let me continue the install.
Once I was past that problem, it was fine and I started playing with it. It is amazing. Amazing.
It does a one time indexing of your system when there is some idle time, and after that it just keeps track of new and changed files as you work. The searches are amazingly quick and search text files, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Outlook mail, browser cache, and all your file names. To do a search for 'jpg' took 0.04seconds and it returned every picture on my computer and every email in which I ever sent, or mentioned a jpg file in. Amazing. Why have you not downloaded it yet?
There is one
beef that I have. I've considered this problem and I've decided it might be a premeditated decision, but I hope it is not. Google Desktop does not look at .cs files, as a C# developer this is very frustrating. For the VB.NET guys it doesn't do .vb files either... Google Desktop will treat .java .c .h .cpp files as text files AND allow for a "filetype:c" or "filetype:java" search. But nothing on .cs files. Google what is the deal with this? I also haven't been able to find anyway to change how certain file types are handled.
Despite this problem I still love it, it integrates itself with
http://www.google.com so that any search on the site will also tell you if you have matches on your own machine, this is done by intercepting google requests and then merging your results with the html when your response comes back. None of your personal info is sent to Google, rest easy. The only thing that is sent is how many searches are run, and how long they took, and even this you can opt out of.
Google is the greatest thing in the world,
Dave will tell you how much
he loves Google if you ask him.
As well as taking over the internet, it is also taking over my machine, I now have my
Gmail, and the
Gmail Notifier,
Picasa for all my pictures,
Google Desktop, and
Google Deskbar. I don't mind this take over a bit.