New Google tool quick at searching bowels of PC
By DWIGHT SILVERMAN
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
Step by step and bit by digital bit, Google is taking over the way PC users find, manage and receive information.
The Mountain View, Calif., company — which went public earlier this year in rebel fashion, using a Dutch auction to distribute its initial shares — has long been the primary destination for those wanting to find a needle in the World Wide Web's chaotic haystack.
Its Internet search capabilities are arguably the best, and it has begun to apply that technology to other areas. I wrote earlier this year about Gmail, Google's free, searchable e-mail service that remains a by-invitation-only beta test (see www.chron.com/gmail).
Last week Google released a free program that applies its search powers to the PC itself. With Google Desktop Search, available for Windows-based computers at desktop.google.com, you can now search documents, Web history, e-mail and even instant messaging chats on your system's hard drive. Results can also be blended, allowing you to search your PC and the entire Internet at once.
Global information searching has been an elusive goal for most software companies. Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online have all said they're working on it — Google has done it, and done it remarkably well.
There are other competing programs, most notably Copernic Desktop Search (www.copernic.com), X1 (www.x1.com) and dtSearch Desktop (www.dtsearch.com), but these don't integrate Web and desktop searching as cleanly as Google's entry.
And Google Desktop Search is incredibly fast. Type search terms in a browser form almost identical to Google's home page, and almost before you hit Enter, you'll have your results sorted by relevance or date.
It's fast because Google Desktop takes some time immediately after installation to "spider" your hard drive, generating an index it uses to search, much the same way that Google's Web site crawls and indexes the Internet.
The index also creates copies of your documents. Click on a result link, and you see the document as a Google Web page, rather than in the application that created it. This can be somewhat disconcerting the first time — imagine your most personal information, like a sensitive e-mail, suddenly being presented to you as a search result.
Search your chats
Google Desktop searches Word, Excel, Powerpoint and plain-text documents. If you use AOL Instant Messenger, it will save your chats and make them searchable. It will also look at your Web-viewing history, then index the pages found there.
For now, the program is picky about what documents it can search and index. It finds Word files, for example, but not those created by Word Perfect. If you use MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, you're out of luck for chat search. It searches Outlook and Outlook Express, but not AOL e-mail or Eudora.
And Google Desktop Search won't automatically scan the Web history of sites viewed in the Netscape or increasingly popular Firefox browsers.
You can tell the software not to index and search specific kinds of files, or to exclude certain Web addresses from history searches. You can also delete specific results so they won't be indexed or show up in results, but the original file is not removed from the hard drive.
Finding it all
Although it's not emphasized in Google Desktop's help pages, the program will find photo, digital music or video files by file name. (Memo to Google: In version 2.0, I want to be able to hum a few bars of a song into my PC's microphone — off-key, of course — and have Google Desktop find it in my MP3 collection. Get on it, OK?)
The program will return results from your PC as part of overall Web searches at Google itself. If you search from Google's home page, you find results popping up that actually live on your own hard drive. The blending of these results — which can be turned off — happens on your hard drive, not on Google's servers.
There are no ads attached to the results generated by Google Desktop Search — at least not yet. And Google says all the information indexed and searched remains on the user's hard drive. If you choose to allow it, the program will collect information about how you use it, as well as crash reports, and send that back to Google. But your personal info stays put.
Possible violations
While I'm not a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade that cried foul over Gmail, there are things about this program that give me pause.
For example, Google Desktop's indexing and copying of e-mail may violate the document management policies of companies that have restrictions on duplicating such messages. And the notion that Google Desktop makes nonencrypted copies of your data opens up the possibility of a virus or spyware being used to filch it and pass it on.
Finally, Google Desktop Search's ability to index pages of Web sites you've visited could be more than a little embarrassing if you've been going places you shouldn't. Someone using your computer could get search results that say more than you want them to know about how you spend your idle time.
HoustonChronicle.com - Computing
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
Step by step and bit by digital bit, Google is taking over the way PC users find, manage and receive information.
The Mountain View, Calif., company — which went public earlier this year in rebel fashion, using a Dutch auction to distribute its initial shares — has long been the primary destination for those wanting to find a needle in the World Wide Web's chaotic haystack.
Its Internet search capabilities are arguably the best, and it has begun to apply that technology to other areas. I wrote earlier this year about Gmail, Google's free, searchable e-mail service that remains a by-invitation-only beta test (see www.chron.com/gmail).
Last week Google released a free program that applies its search powers to the PC itself. With Google Desktop Search, available for Windows-based computers at desktop.google.com, you can now search documents, Web history, e-mail and even instant messaging chats on your system's hard drive. Results can also be blended, allowing you to search your PC and the entire Internet at once.
Global information searching has been an elusive goal for most software companies. Microsoft, Yahoo and America Online have all said they're working on it — Google has done it, and done it remarkably well.
There are other competing programs, most notably Copernic Desktop Search (www.copernic.com), X1 (www.x1.com) and dtSearch Desktop (www.dtsearch.com), but these don't integrate Web and desktop searching as cleanly as Google's entry.
And Google Desktop Search is incredibly fast. Type search terms in a browser form almost identical to Google's home page, and almost before you hit Enter, you'll have your results sorted by relevance or date.
It's fast because Google Desktop takes some time immediately after installation to "spider" your hard drive, generating an index it uses to search, much the same way that Google's Web site crawls and indexes the Internet.
The index also creates copies of your documents. Click on a result link, and you see the document as a Google Web page, rather than in the application that created it. This can be somewhat disconcerting the first time — imagine your most personal information, like a sensitive e-mail, suddenly being presented to you as a search result.
Search your chats
Google Desktop searches Word, Excel, Powerpoint and plain-text documents. If you use AOL Instant Messenger, it will save your chats and make them searchable. It will also look at your Web-viewing history, then index the pages found there.
For now, the program is picky about what documents it can search and index. It finds Word files, for example, but not those created by Word Perfect. If you use MSN Messenger or Yahoo Messenger, you're out of luck for chat search. It searches Outlook and Outlook Express, but not AOL e-mail or Eudora.
And Google Desktop Search won't automatically scan the Web history of sites viewed in the Netscape or increasingly popular Firefox browsers.
You can tell the software not to index and search specific kinds of files, or to exclude certain Web addresses from history searches. You can also delete specific results so they won't be indexed or show up in results, but the original file is not removed from the hard drive.
Finding it all
Although it's not emphasized in Google Desktop's help pages, the program will find photo, digital music or video files by file name. (Memo to Google: In version 2.0, I want to be able to hum a few bars of a song into my PC's microphone — off-key, of course — and have Google Desktop find it in my MP3 collection. Get on it, OK?)
The program will return results from your PC as part of overall Web searches at Google itself. If you search from Google's home page, you find results popping up that actually live on your own hard drive. The blending of these results — which can be turned off — happens on your hard drive, not on Google's servers.
There are no ads attached to the results generated by Google Desktop Search — at least not yet. And Google says all the information indexed and searched remains on the user's hard drive. If you choose to allow it, the program will collect information about how you use it, as well as crash reports, and send that back to Google. But your personal info stays put.
Possible violations
While I'm not a member of the tinfoil-hat brigade that cried foul over Gmail, there are things about this program that give me pause.
For example, Google Desktop's indexing and copying of e-mail may violate the document management policies of companies that have restrictions on duplicating such messages. And the notion that Google Desktop makes nonencrypted copies of your data opens up the possibility of a virus or spyware being used to filch it and pass it on.
Finally, Google Desktop Search's ability to index pages of Web sites you've visited could be more than a little embarrassing if you've been going places you shouldn't. Someone using your computer could get search results that say more than you want them to know about how you spend your idle time.
HoustonChronicle.com - Computing
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