This weekend I installed the Google Desktop Search tool. It is currently in Beta, it is free, about 400K in size and can be downloaded from http://desktop.google.com/. After you have downloaded and installed (within a minute) it starts scanning the files on your harddisk: Word, Excel and Powerpoint, HTML, text files such as Java and Outlook Mail. You can interupt this indexing process at any time – it will automatically resume when there is Idle Cpu time available.
As soon as the indexing has started, you can start searching for documents. It is Google as you know it – but running locally against local data!
And it is FAST. I have never liked the Windows Explorer Search – slow and never able to return exactly what I was looking for. With Google I find my documents within seconds, from my emails to my Office documents and even the webpages I have visited in the past (yes, it also indexes the webpages from my browser’s cache!).
I have never been one for hardware gadgets or software goodies and I have certainly never before written about one in this weblog. But I really would like to recommend this Google Desktop Search!
Terrier is an open source desktop search with cutting edge technology available for any platform. Retrieval is very fast.
For those who are not security conscious, you may like to know that Google announced the Production Release 1.0: GoogleBlog – Taking the plungeMonday, March 07, 2005 –
More insight can be found via http://news.google.com/news?q=google%20privacy%20risk&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&sa=N&tab=wn
Use it wisely and only on your home computer (at least if you dont want to share it 😉
See, among others, CNN webpage: “Google search tool a privacy risk”(20/10/2004).
There is already enough out there with your tag on it.
The windows standard search is a nightmare indeed! I’m definitely going to install the Google browser on my Windows XP partition. Under Linux, I’ll stick to “locate”, “find”, “xargs” and “grep” 🙂
I have tried Filehand (free desktop search tool). It provides also PDF file scanning and can allow you to define any extensions as scannable text file. So index your sql, jsp or java file is not a problem 🙂
Unfortunatly I’m too organized for this kind of tool, I bearly use it for my daily work.
Windows Explorer Search in Windows XP is completely broken. I got so desperate that I was using “findstr /s” to get accurate results! Google Desktop has really been useful. Wished it indexed my .sql files, though.
looks kind of cool. wish it supported linux though