Google Launches Desktop Search - Exclusive Review
At Digital Life today, Google will announce the launch of Google Desktop, their long awaited desktop search technology. While many of us have been distracted with rumors about a Google browser, Google has quietly been working on the beta version of their desktop search (previously code-named "Puffin") and today they launch it, in all its glory.

So what do you get from Google Desktop?

Take a look at the documents Google Desktop can index and search:



The tiny download (just 400K) takes seconds to install and get you up and running (sorry Mac fans, no version for you). While you can use Google Desktop immediately, it takes an hour or two to index your hard drive and all of your files. However, once the index is complete, Google Desktop is very fast and easy to use. In fact, Google Desktop updates "on the fly" - read a new email in Outlook and that email is added to your index immediately!


Google Desktop gives you a quick summary of its complete index of your computer.

Familiar user interface

Instead of creating a new user-interface for Google Desktop, Google simply added a "desktop" tab to the homepage of Google.com (viewable only by those that install Google Desktop). This makes using Google Desktop a snap and allows you to view results in a format that is very familiar to millions of users.


As you can see, the standard Google Desktop view shows all files located on your computer, which you can sort by relevance or by date.

One of the great things about Google Desktop is just how intuitive it is to use. In the screenshot above, you can clearly see that the default setting allows you to view all of your relevant documents. But by clicking simple text links, you can refine your search to just emails, files, web pages, AIM chats etc. Searching through previously viewed web pages is very cool. Not only can it help you re-discover that page you looked at last week, but Google Desktop also shows you a thumbnail image of that page. You can also use simple operators to tell Google what files to look for:

• For Word documents: enter filetype:word or filetype:doc

• For Excel files: enter filetype:excel or filetype:xls

• For PowerPoint files: enter filetype:powerpoint or filetype:ppt

• For plain text files: enter filetype:text or filetype:txt

• Minus (-) searches: Sometimes what you’re searching for has more than one meaning. Bass can refer to fishing or music. You can exclude a word from your search by putting a minus sign (“-”) immediately in front of the term you want to avoid. (Be sure to include a space before the minus sign.) To find files about bass that don’t contain music, type: bass -music into the Google Desktop Search box.

Integrating with Web Search

Google Desktop uses a local IP when you search your desktop for a file or document, but something very interesting happens when you conduct a normal web search. Remember those little info boxes you see at the top of some Google search results? The ones that sometimes include snippets from Google News and other times include Froogle results? Well, when you download Google Desktop, expect to see something very similar. While you can disable the feature, enabling desktop search results on Google web search helps you search the web and your hard drive at the same time. Take a look...


With Google Desktop installed, your normal web searches will also show the top results from your computer.

Works with Outlook but not Gmail

An interesting side note - Google Desktop is not compatible with Google's Gmail service. Apparently, Gmail utilizes javascript which Google Desktop is unable, at this time, to spider. This, and the fact that we only got our hands on the tool just days before launch, suggests that perhaps Google rushed Desktop to the market. Maybe the launch of AOL's desktop solution and Ask Jeeves upcoming desktop search, put pressure on Google to act fast.

Privacy issues?

So what about privacy? I know that privacy freaks advocates will be looking for something to complain about. Surprisingly, there doesn't seem to be any cause for real concern. Google promises that it is not relaying any of your personal information back to its servers (hence some of the results are shown on a local IP). While it does ask you to take part in "sending non-personal usage data and crash reports", you can turn-off this feature. Here is Google's privacy statement for Google Desktop...

Google is commited to making search on your desktop as easy as searching the web. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we designed and built Google Desktop Search with respect for your privacy.

So that you can easily search your computer, the Google Desktop Search application indexes and stores versions of your files and other computer activity, such as email, chats, and web history. These versions may also be mixed with your Web search results to produce results pages for you that integrate relevant content from your computer and information from the Web.

Your computer's content is not made accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit permission.

The only thing that was of any concern to us was Google Desktop's ability to store documents in its cache long after you have deleted them from your hard drive. This should cause concern, especially for companies who's employees download the tool. Sensitive data that you thought had been destroyed, could be hanging around ready for that next virus to take advantage of.

Expect AdWords integration soon.

After testing Google Desktop for a couple of days, it is clearly a tool that will become a normal part of many users everyday searching habits. The interface is familiar and the results are accurate and can be filtered. And what about that interface? How smart is Google to utilize the normal Google search format when displaying desktop search results? Well, they now have a way to increase the number of people who are exposed to Google AdWords each day. Not only have they instantly increased their potential inventory - AdWords are not currently shown on Google Desktop results, but we bet you'll see them once it comes out of beta - as that increase resides at Google.com, they get to keep all of the revenues too! Maybe they will hit that 50% annual revenue increase after all!

Update: The official announcement.

Update 2: Here's a round-up of stories covering Google's new desktop search.

Mercury News
Search Engine Watch
John Battelle
WSJ.com
Reuters
News.com
Andy Beal | permalink | +marktd |