With Google Desktop, you can search for files on your hard drive just as easily as you can search the Internet. How often have you wished you could search your hard disk as easily as you use Google to search the Web? Now you can do just that, with a new beta application called Google Desktop. A simple, small (446KB), and free application (download here), Google Desktop indexes your hard disk the way Google's own servers index the World Wide Web. Your hard disk search results are returned in a Web page format, just like the Google Web site you're used to.
Upside: Compared to other local search engines, Google Desktop offers some excellent features. First, it's incredibly easy to use. Google Desktop also searches most things you need: local Microsoft Office files, e-mail messages, chat transcripts, and your Web browser cache. It puts all of your search items (such as e-mail and files) on one results Web page; other local search apps make you search for different file types separately.
Once installed, Google Desktop searches your hard disk whenever you execute a Google Web search. It adds a Desktop link to the top of the Web search page and puts a summary of the results from your computer on the top of the Web search results. You can then drill into your local results to get a full list. What could be easier?
Like other local search products, the program installs an indexing engine on your computer. It runs whenever your PC is idle. Once the index is built (and even before the full index is done), search results return blazingly fast.
Downside: This is still a beta product, and we expect some of the features and user interface issues to change before Google releases the final product.
Most importantly, in our tests, the initial indexing performance was slow. While competing search engines indexed our test system in less than an hour, Google Desktop was still indexing after several hours.
On the interface front, the current version displays e-mail results in its own browser window. You have to click a View In Outlook link to display your message in its native application. That's an extra step we'd rather avoid in the future. And while the Web interface is second nature to Google users today, we're not convinced it's the best way to scan local search results. For instance, X1's live search, in which you see your search results list winnow down as you type in more of your query, exploits the power of the PC and makes more sense when searching a single system. We'd like to see that here.
Also, the thing that makes the Google Web search truly great -- its intelligent search result rankings -- doesn't apply in its Desktop version. Like other local search engines, Google ranks results by content and time of last access. It can't incorporate factors such as global popularity and cross-linking that make the Web version of Google seem almost psychic. Google's advantage on the Web doesn't transfer to its desktop version, so you get a jumble of search results instead.
We're also a little worried about potential security risks with Google Desktop. It works by installing a local Web server on your machine. This server is designed to be accessed only by the local machine, but we are not convinced that somebody won't hack a way around this.
Outlook: Even in its early beta form, and despite its initial flaws, Google Desktop is now the local search engine to beat, if only because hundreds of millions of Google Web users will quickly download it and start using it. It's easy to use and fast (once its indexing is done), and we have no doubt the brainpower of Google's engineers will enable the company to make improvements in its search results and speed more quickly than its competitors. Only Microsoft, AOL, and Yahoo can mount a serious threat in the important competitive arenas (marketing, development, user interface), but even they are outgunned by Google on the Web today. We expect this product to become a world beater in very short order.
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