A Review of Google Desktop Search
At Rokland, we sell a lot of wireless Internet products, and we like to talk about those products here on rokblog, but we also like to talk about other things as well, such as what to do once you are on the Internet. The Internet is a great source of entertainment, it contains a wealth of news and information, and you can also find some great software programs out there. Of course anyone who hasn't been living in the dark ages already knows this, even if they don't have Internet access themselves. But if you haven't had time to check out anything new on the Internet for a while, we suggest you take a look at the new the Google Desktop Search program which is available for download at the Google.com web site.
Have you ever tried searching for a document or an email on your computer with a loose set of keywords you remember from a letter or conversation? Perhaps you wrote a note somewhere on your PC, maybe even in an instant message program, about going window shopping with a friend next Monday, but you can't remember her phone number, although you know it is documented somewhere on your PC. So you try using the built-in Windows search tool with the keywords "Windows" and "Monday." Forty-five minutes later, you are greeted with a list of files that have names you don't even recognize, like rbnttp.dll. I always found this strange because you can locate almost anything on the Internet, which is much much larger than your hard drive, in mere seconds. The folks at Google must have found that strange too, because they released their Google Desktop search tool which basically treats your hard drive like the Internet, and allows you to search through documents, emails, and even instant messages almost instantaneously. It also gives you the option of narrowing your search down to just emails, just web files, or just documents. If you use a mail program like MS Outlook, you can search through emails instantly as well. The MS Outlook program by itself can literally take a half hour to find keywords when searching folders with thousands of messages. The Google Desktop search treats your emails just like Internet web pages and returns results in seconds.
The first time you use the program you will have to wait quite a while because it needs to crawl your entire hard drive in order to be able to return results (when I say "you will have to wait" I don't mean your PC will be unusable in the meantime, I just mean you won't be able to search with the tool until the crawling process completes). But once that is done, it constantly crawls new files and emails in the background, so that search results are at the tip of your finger. And you can access the desktop search page right from Google's web site.
So do we give this program a big thumbs up? Well, not quite. It is great, no doubt, but the drawback is that, just like with Google's Gmail service, results are scanned by a bot and relevant advertisements are displayed on your search results pages. It's not the same as having a human browse through all of your sensitive files, but it does create a privacy trade-off. By using the service you are allowing an outside bot to have access to every name, number, and word that is on your hard drive. While the folks at Google could probably care less about what is on your PCs, what if an outside party were to ever somehow gain control of that bot and control it remotely? Not a likelihood, but certainly not an impossibility.
All things considered, I really don't know how I lived without the Google Desktop search program before. But while I use it on my home PC, I don't think I would suggest deploying the program in an enterprise environment. Though I should note if you do need a search solution for desktop PCs in a corporate environment, Google does offer some pay-for-play solutions, so all hope is not lost.
posted at: 01:10 | path: | permanent link to this entry