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Google To Launch Desktop Search Tool
from the well...-um...-of-course? dept
I assume this will surprise all of about three or four people who haven't been paying attention, but Google is preparing to launch a desktop search tool that will let you search through your own hard drive (in exchange, I assume, for contextual ads). The press will make a big deal about this and how it's a way for them to challenge Microsoft's Longhorn offering, which will have greatly improved local search. I'm not sure it's that interesting. Longhorn is so far off that it's really not worth speculating whether or not this product actually competes with it or not. The more interesting question is, if this local search tool involves contextual ads, will the privacy folks start complaining again that Google is now snooping through your hard drive?
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Desktop search?
It'll be very interesting to see what advantages, if any, Google can offer in searching locally stored documents.
Most of google's focus and technology today is in the ability to "spider" the internet, find relationships between documents, and extract the valuable information from mounds of junk and intentional attempts to increase the "page rank" of certain sites.
It's not clear to me how any of that technology translates to searching the local drive. Personally, I'm going to stick with Start->Search->For Files or Folders (or "find / -type f -print |xargs egrep ..." in Unix).
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Re: Desktop search?
This will probably spider your hard drive and index the contents of your files, similar to the Google search appliance that you can run on your corporate servers.
I wonder if someone will create a "lite" version, similar to Kazaa Lite, that doesn't serve ads?
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Will it search through PDF files?
We're starting to run into an issue at work of not being able to find information because we have it stored in PDF files and haven't been able to find a convenient way to search through a hard drive full of PDF files for the right one, short of opening each one manually and performing a search.
If this new Google product will search through PDF files, I'll be sure to get it.
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Rest assured Mike ...
.... corporations REQUIRE Google to do this well. And if they do, the amount of money they make selling text ads will .. well, amount to chump change.
Why has it take Google so long to figure out that, while surfing HTML pages on the web is certainly useful ... being able to do the same type of search on my LAN (searching just my hard drive would be pointless since the only thing ON my hard drive are operating system files) would be INVALUABLE.
In other words, I WILL PAY A LOT OF MONEY for this capability, if it is executed properly.
Also, I will buy GOOGOL's of shares of stock (hope I don't get sued for using that word.)
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Another idea retread.
Alta Vista years ago offered a free program that could do this. No ads either. They unfortunately discontinued it when they decided to focus on being a "portal" rather than a search engine.
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Re: Rest assured Mike ...
Why don't you buy one of their Google Search Appliances then? They will only set you back about $20K.
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Re: Will it search through PDF files?
Try Enfish
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Google Announces Desktop Search
This is now a reality. It's very cool and does not serve up context ads. Check out my review here:
http://www.byronprather.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=fd7871d8-65c6-4462-92d2-bd5a417d3adb
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