November 02, 2004, 8:04 PM — Google's latest service, Desktop Search, promises to be one of its most
interesting innovations, and also one of its more controversial ones.
Desktop Search promises to bring Google's ease of use and accurate
results to local searches. However, it also could create new headaches
for network administrators and for users of web terminals.
Desktop Search downloads and installs on your computer, and then indexes
your files when the computer is idle. It integrates search results from
your local workstation seamlessly with normal Google results.
Installation
The installer is small, about 450KB, and installation is very
straightforward. Once installed, Google Desktop opens your default
browser so you can configure your preferences. Once this is confirmed,
it presents a message stating, "one-time indexing has started". This can
take several hours, but runs in the background when your computer is
idle.
You can also configure what items should be searched. Options include:
* Outlook email
* Outlook express email
* AOL IM
* Word
* Excel
* PowerPoint
* Text files
* Web history
* Secured web history
Desktop Search in Action
The installer creates a shortcut on the desktop that opens up your web
browser to the Google Desktop Search page.
Desktop Search works just like a web search, except it returns results
from your local hard drive. At the top of the results are links you can
use to filter the results by emails, files, chats, or web history.
When Desktop Search is installed, the Google search page is modified to
include "Desktop" as one of the search options. When you do a search,
Desktop Search results are integrated with results from the web. If
there are local results that match your request, a link titled "x
results stored on your computer" appears at the top of the search
results.
The results are impressive, but even more impressive is the speed saved
by eliminating navigation. Type a search request in and within seconds
you've got the best matches from your hard drive, in addition to links
from the Net. It's much faster than remembering where you saved a file
and navigating to it.
A serendipitous side effect is that Desktop Search makes it easier to
find pages that you've visited recently. Enter a search request, a click
on the "web history" link, and you'll get a list of all the related
pages in your cache.
Room for Improvement
While Desktop Search is a useful advance in search, there's plenty of
room for improvement. One annoyance is that Desktop Search doesn't
recognize your existing Google search preferences. For example, even if
you've set Google to return twenty or thirty items per page, Desktop
Search returns ten items.
Desktop Search is not available for Macintosh or Linux. It doesn't index
the text of PDF files, unlike Google's web search.
The security implications of the application are also unclear. Desktop
Search can index secured web pages that contain private information.
This is a concern for users of shared or public computers. Google may
need to find a way to alert users when secured content is being cached.
Summary
Desktop Search is a deceptively simple step into the desktop, but it is
sure to have significant long-term impact. The move ups the stakes in
the search war. If users adopt Desktop Search in big numbers, it will
increase the lock Google has on search.
Even more significantly, it pushes a Google web application onto
people's computers. It's easy to imagine Google adding an option to sync
your search index and file cache with web-based versions. This would let
you find recent documents, whether you searched for them at home or at
work. This, along with applications like GMail, move functions away from
Windows and into the Web world.
Google's technology is new and powerful, but the risks associated with
aren't understood. A prudent approach to using it would be to keep
caching of secured pages disabled, and to avoid public terminals for
secured activity.
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