What does this Google thing do that I can't already do better?

dalziel86

strider_mt2k

Brian Lam

Indexed 150,000 files, and finds intelligent results in less than half a second.

Spotlight out, Google Desktop in.

zbender

You are wrong. Looks like you haven't read the article and you don't have a clear idea of was Rosetta is:

- Google Desktop is a Universal Application, meaning it's designed and compiled to run optimized on both PowerPC (like the one I used for my informal test) and Intel processors.

- Rosetta is an emulation engine that will run PowerPC-compiled applications on Intel-based hardware under Mac OS X. Roughly, it translates PowerPC code into Intel code on the fly. Nothing to do with the article or Google Desktop.

Jesus Diaz

bdkennedy1

Actually, GD excludes the same folders that you set Spotlight to exclude (let's just say 'Documents/Archive/Marketing Plan 2003 Western Region'). And I believe you can set GD to NOT cache deleted documents.

madmaxmedia

x23

As for the comments about Spotlight, It's good to have options.

Jesus Diaz

In my experience, Spotlight has proven to be ridiculously painful to use. Generally, I find it very slow and returns too many results without enough options to narrow it down without knowing exactly what I'm looking for.

I do use QuickSilver but QS goes by file name and won't tell me the contents of a file. It also won't find exactly what page I was viewing when I saw a really interesting gadget I can't quite remember the name of. I used to really rely on Google Desktop being a permanent memory of everything I've seen on the web. I didn't need bookmarks with GD.

As for privacy options, you can choose to have Google Desktop not save any sites, not save sites that are https, or not save any particular locations. Also, you can remove anything (file, web page, etc.) from your local search results.

I for one am excited to see how it runs on my MBP. The integration of local search, history, Gmail, and the web index in one place is great.

AaronH

Haven't you ever accidentally closed or deleted a file you've been working on? Or typed "rm -rf" when you didn't mean to? Now you can just search for the file with Google Desktop and recover all the text content you've lost.

So, Google Desktop saves copies of my files even after I've deleted them? That doesn't sound at all desirable to me. If I wanted to be unable to delete files, I'd just rm the rm utility.

I wonder if Google Desktop can be set not to index my porn, the way Spotlight can be. Sounds like Google don't quite get the whole privacy thing, if you can't ever delete file copies using Desktop.

Manuel

So it does what Spotlight does but takes up additional resources? And I should download this WHY?

I was hoping Jesus would address that in the review. Oh, well.

I guess you might want it if there were a Google widget you really wanted that wasn't available and couldn't easily be ported to Dashboard. Or if you wanted to have indexed search of your GMail mailbox without hooking Mail up to it via POP.

Seems like a couple of real unlikely scenarios, though.

Manuel

But it's not really the same as Spotlight - it's not really a search program.

Back to Google for a sec: it runs slower than spotlight? Screw it, then. Spotlight is slow enough as it is.

sammy baby

kibets

I am ofcourse talking of PICASSA :D

anshuman

shamelessly pimping by youtube demo of it working.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGj-M8AjfKk .

Now i hope such nice things continue at other apps too ..... i can just wish... :(

anshuman

embee

wannymahoots

I just ditched Launchbar for it, which says something. And I still can't understand why I would want to install Google Desktop when I have Spotlight and Quicksilver?

digidandy

Weirdo

no thanks, i'll stick with spotlight.

navinjohnson

Optimistic Prime