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Google Experiments With Local Filesystem Search
Posted by
timothy
on Wed May 19, 2004 01:08 PM
from the better-than-what's-built-in dept.
from the better-than-what's-built-in dept.
Teoti writes "No, Puffin is not the next name of your favorite email client, but, according to the New York Times (NSA reg. req.), the project codename for a new Google search application coming directly into your desktop, that will let you search your local filesystem efficiently. This is different from, but complementary of, the Google DeskBar that already lets you search the Web. The article also gives a few words on the end of the stand alone browser in Longhorn."
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But the real question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But the real question is.. (Score:5, Funny)
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I think most of us already know... (Score:5, Funny)
Finally, a way to effectively search through my gigabytes of pr0n!
Re:I think most of us already know... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I think most of us already know... (Score:5, Funny)
Strangely enough, Google will help you Go Ogle your porn!
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Also on CNET... No NYT Registration (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Also on CNET... No NYT Registration (Score:5, Informative)
SAN FRANCISCO, May 18 - Edging closer to a direct confrontation with Microsoft [slashdot.org], Google, the Web search engine, is preparing to introduce a powerful file and text software search tool for locating information stored on personal computers.
Google's software, which is expected to be introduced soon, according to several people with knowledge of the company's plans, is the clearest indication to date that the company, based in Mountain View, Calif., hopes to extend its search business to compete directly with Microsoft's control of desktop computing.
Improved technology for searching information stored on a PC will also be a crucial feature of Microsoft's long-delayed version of its Windows operating system called Longhorn. That version, which is not expected before 2006 at the earliest, will have a redesigned file system, making it possible to track and retrieve information in ways not currently possible with Windows software.
Google's move is in part a defensive one, because the company is concerned about Microsoft's ability to make searching on the Web as well as on a PC a central part of its operating system. By integrating more search functions into Windows, Microsoft could conceivably challenge Google the way it threatened, and destroyed, an earlier rival, Netscape, by incorporating Web browsing into the Windows 98 operating system.
A Google spokesman declined to comment about the new search tool.
Although Google's core business rests on huge farms of server computers that permit fast searching on the Internet, the company has already taken several steps to move beyond that business.
Last year, Google began testing a free program called the Google Deskbar that makes it possible to search the Web by entering words and phrases in a small dialog box placed in the Windows desktop taskbar at the bottom of the computer screen.
Google also sells a computer search system designed to index and retrieve information created and stored by a single organization.
There is a rich history of less-than-successful attempts to create information search tools for personal computers. In the 1980's, for example, Mitchell Kapor's On Technology developed On Location for retrieving information on Macintosh computers and Bill Gross, a prominent software developer, led a group of programmers to create Lotus Magellan for the PC.
Digital Equipment's Alta Vista search engine group also developed a search tool for data stored on desktop PC's. Today there are a number of commercial products for desktop searches like X1 and dtSearch. Moreover, both the Macintosh and Windows operating systems have file and text retrieval capabilities.
The Google software project, which is code-named Puffin and which will be available as a free download from Google's Web site, has been running internally at the company for about a year.
The project was started, in part, to prepare Google for competing with Windows Longhorn, which according to industry analysts will dispense with the need for a stand-alone browser.
The disappearance of the Web browser and the integration of both Web search and PC search into the Windows operating system could potentially marginalize Google's search engine. Google, well aware of this threat, hired a Microsoft product manager last year to oversee the Puffin project as part of its strategy to compete with Microsoft's incursion into its territory.
Microsoft has shown demonstrations of its new search technology, which emphasizes the use of natural language in queries like "Where are my vacation photos?" or "What is a firewall?" Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will ins
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Re:Also on CNET... No NYT Registration (Score:5, Insightful)
This is one of the silliest notions I've ever heard. If they make no distinction between local files (in user's control) and files "on the internet" (beyond user's control), what kind of crap are we going to have to put up with when people start saying "hey, where's that document I was looking at yesterday?" because they never knew it was on someone else's hard drive and got erased.
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Advertisements (Score:5, Insightful)
privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:privacy (Score:5, Interesting)
Google seems to be as anti-ad as most people on Slashdot. I personally hate ads, but I feel that most of Google's ads are non-invasive and in good taste.
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I can't frickin' wait (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I can't frickin' wait (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I can't frickin' wait (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about that... it used to take me several months to find a document on the Internet when I had to download and grep the entire World Wide Web. My bandwidth bills were astronomical. Since I started using Google, I can now find the same files in a few milliseconds. I say they have much better code than my old "wget -r http://*.*|grep foo".
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Competing with Microsoft? (Score:5, Informative)
X1 [x1.com] seems to be the most popular one out there.
DiskMeta [diskmeta.com], they had this project in beta for a while, the Windows product went into relese just last week, the site says
DT Search [dtsearch.com], I remember their ads in bunch of computer magazines, although have never used them myself.
EFS [com.com], found it on download.com, supports MS Office and PDF as well as other formats.
Actually yes (Score:5, Informative)
If you have followed Microsoft developments around Longhorn you might have noticed that search is one of the top priority features that microsoft is going to integrate directly into the operating system. So once Longhorn is released Microsoft would become the biggest competitor to Google's search applications on the web as well the desktop(with this application)
Search is the next big thing on which a lot of players are concentrating and Microsoft entering the field has skewed the competition towards the desktop and everyone including Google is preparing for the battle.
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NYT Article (Score:5, Informative)
Wow, seems to me .... (Score:5, Funny)
I keep looking at Google and thinking "wow, this is just like AltaVista, without the death spiral!"
Similar ideas (Score:5, Informative)
Second, an indexing software that does the same thing is already available today and worked very well when I tried it out. It's actually almost perfect, except for the fact that it causes occasional hard drive thrashing as it tries to keep the index up-to-date. This is unfortunately a rather major downside, but if you can bear with this, you'll get literally instant file searches on your entire hard drive -- it narrows down the possible matches as you type each letter. It even indexes file contents for small files. I'm talking about X1 [x1.com].
Antitrust settlement (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing. (Score:5, Funny)
Google should distribute Mozilla (Score:5, Interesting)
Altavista did it 6 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps Google can fill this void in the pathetic Windows power tool-set ("Windows power tool-set" being close to an oxymoron).
But, despite my love for Google, in these more Orwellian times, I'm glad that I have the tools (not from MS) to monitor port activity.
Isn't it better just to be organized? (Score:5, Interesting)
Even when a file crosses multiple logical groups, (picture, jpg, family, nephews, 2004) if my information categories are sensible, and I use a heirarchy that makes sense to me, I don't need search that often. In fact, I can't recall the last time I had to do a search of my drive to find a file. (I should probably mention that my work requires a lot of information mapping, so creating and maintaining such a structure is trivial for me)
Of course, since Windows search is so inefficient and (sometimes) problematic, I learned long ago not to rely on it.
bluez3
The *nix way ... (Score:5, Funny)
b) have fun!
Sunny Dubey
Color me suspicious (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft believes that Longhorn users will no longer think about where information is stored; they will instead see a unified view of documents stored on both the Internet and on the desktop.
I don't like this idea. At all.
The main problem from my point of view has to do with ownership and control. Generally speaking, what's physically on my machine(s) is *mine*, that is subject to my total control (we'll leave aside intellectual property issues). I can add, change, delete, etc.
Still generally speaking, what's on some machine I access over the net is *not mine* in the sense that my control is reduced. Usually other people can do something with that information (again, add, change, delete) and if the machnine is taken offline, I have no access and no control at all.
As a simple example, consider a web page. In one case I make a local copy of it on my machine. In the other case I just have a bookmark. The difference in control is fairly obvious...
Now, what happens if we make users believe there's no difference between their local hard drive and Internet? That we drill into their heads that they are the same?
Well, you still have no control over information stored on the 'net. Thus, if you were trained to think that the local drive and the 'net are basically the same, then you would expect to have no control over information stored on your hard drive.
Note that by an amazing coincidence, that's also the goal of DRM -- that you have no control over information (that they call content) stored on your hard drive.
Also note that the flip side of the coin -- making your hard drive irrelevant by switching to a subscription service for everything, from OS to applications to content, is also a highly popular idea in Redmond and elsewhere.
So color me highly suspicious with regard to that idea...
Re:Color me suspicious (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, you still have no control over information stored on the 'net. Thus, if you were trained to think that the local drive and the 'net are basically the same, then you would expect to have no control over information stored on your hard drive.
People are already looking to do this voluntarily. Even among the pseudoenlightened here. Look through some of the comments regarding Gmail. And especially the (false) 1TB announcement.
Scripting your wordprocessor to autosave to your 1TB (or 1GB) Gmail acct.
Online hard drive.
No more backup worries! I can store all my stuff on Gmail!
Will they release the API so I can automate this?
People won't need to be forced into this...they will come running.
But I do agree with you. I don't like it either.
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Microsoft will Lose (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Microsoft doesn't understand that people LOVE Google. Nobody particularly LOVES Microsoft anymore. Product activation, high prices, and security flaws are causing too many headaches.
2. Google is more innovative. What has Microsoft innovated in the past few years? Their products keep changing their look, but what about user behavior? AD changed admin behavior, but how has IE or Word gotten easier to use? Google has all kinds of creative stuff in the pipe. The Google toolbar has not only changed the way many of my users search, but it prevents a lot of popup related spyware installations as well.
3. Google is clean. If I see that damn dog show up one more time I'll kill myself. When I search my file system I don't want to hide the stupid mutt, change my options so that subfolders are searched, then click through three screens to say I want to search my file system. Google will cut through this nonsense because they believe in simple/clean interfaces.
4. The technology Microsoft seeks doesn't exist. Nobody can create a search engine based on current technology that takes plain speech user input and magically transforms it into accurate search results. Everyone I've seen that's tried this has failed to an extent. You can't just try your best to fuzzy match and pass it off as good results.
Re:Microsoft will Lose (Score:5, Informative)
Create HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Curr
You'll have the old windows 2000 search dialogue.
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Re:Microsoft will Lose (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Microsoft will Lose (Score:5, Insightful)
So... hate Microsoft all you want. I've used and loved Google since 1998 (ie forever), and I'm not betting on this race.
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...and all you need is... (Score:5, Funny)
The real question is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would people be willing to live with ads sprinkled throughout their search items ?
Re:Windows + F = useless (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Windows + F = useless (Score:5, Informative)
Or so I'm told. My personal experiences with allowing the Windows Indexing service to run in the background have been that it's more trouble than its worth. Yes, on the rare occasion that it's actually -not- indexing when I search, the search is blazingly fast (compared to a non-indexed search).
But if the index is currently being modified, then the Windows search feature can't use it. Period. So when you search, you get the text "Windows is currently building an index of the files on drive C:" and it falls back to the regular, non-indexed search. In addition, the indexer consumes massive amounts of RAM while indexing, so a search run when the index is being modified ends up being about two times slower than usual.
It also doesn't seem to be able to tell when the user is idle. No amount of tweaking seems to fix this, without leaving you with a days-old index. If the index is complete, but you've saved a file since it was completed, that file will not show up in the search at all. I've had it kick on while in the middle of working on something else so often that I finally just turned it off entirely and have resigned myself to slow(er) searches in Windows.
In the interest of fairness I will say that the search seems to work quite well when searching a remote server that is running the indexing service. But running it locally is just a pain.
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Re:Windows + F = useless (Score:5, Funny)
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wingrep (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I'm guessing in a year (Score:5, Funny)
(Taken from this [fark.com] Fark thread. Warning/Warnung/Advertencia/Avertissement: "Adult" language contained within link.)
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Google folks are smart. Surely they've developed something that is more capable than merely find and grep, or file-hunting-dog, or Sherlock...
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Informative)
See Lucene for a good open source inverted text index search engine.
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Grep and find don't pre-index the files. So searching my machine takes me longer than searching the entire web. Google has indexing and caching down to a science. I can't wait for this to be on the market.
--
Lessons from Microsoft [blogspot.com]
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
They might be windows only, but there is a chance they'll decide to please the rest of us, too.
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Interesting)
Having done quite a bit of both in the past several years, I'd highly disagree. There are plenty of off the shelf products or methods to create cross-platform applications and very very few (and generally poor in quality) tools or even documentation to write cross-platform websites (modern ones, with dhtml and heavy usage of DOM).
But a lot of the code (particularly for interacting with the file system and the GUI bits) will be platform-specific.
Nope, that's pretty much been standardized, assuming you're writing from scratch. Now porting an application written platform specific is a completely different story. But this example is an application written from scratch.
And as for filesystems, well... nowadays filesystems are much more consistant than, say, SysV versus VMS versus the dozen variants of CP/M. Subdirectories and pretty consistant meta information (date created, date modified, date accessed, etc) on every file is the accepted standard. They may do things different under the hood, but (at this time) they are all pretty much POSIX.
--
Evan
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Google has a vested interest in trying to help diminish Microsoft's desktop market share. Doing so increases the relative market value of Google's products relative to Microsoft's products.
To help drive a wedge between Microsoft and their current desktop customers, Google will almost certainly port this kind of tool to other OSes. They would then get into various "enterprise" partnerships with IT solution providers to push pre-canned non-Windows desktops into corporate accounts. This product in particular would help to sell alternative desktops against Longhorn's alleged new filesystem features.
If this strategy were successful, Google would stand to pick up a good bit of revenue and mindshare at Microsoft's expense. My guess is definitely: Cross platform.
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Re:What operating systems does it work on? (Score:5, Insightful)
Has Google distributed something that you can install on your Linux or Mac OS computer? Ever?
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Re:interesting (Score:5, Interesting)
Google researchers are allotted 20% of their working time to do outside projects or to follow personal interests. Google News and Gmail were both results of work done during this "20%" time. So in short, no, I don't think Google has really stretched their resources any more so than before.
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Re:DO NO EVIL? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Warning: lack of cynicism ahead)
Seeing as they've built an empire on goodwill, a high-quality free search service, and word-of-mouth name recognition, I'm tempted to guess that their big benefit is continued goodwill and good karma from their userbase.
Yes, this is a novel concept in a business world where most companies look at customers and see numbers. Thing is, it's goodwill and a user-centric business plan have made Google the great company it is.
It could be that the 'catch' you're looking for is that Puffin will further solidify their already strong user relationship.
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Re:Coming from the company... (Score:5, Informative)
I wish a could beat the creator of google-watch.org and every person who ever linked to it with a gigantic clue stick.
First of all, the creator of google-watch.org has a really big axe to grind [google-watch-watch.org] with Google.
Second, HTTP is a stateless protocol. If you want a user's preferences to to persist within a session you need to use cookies or attach a lot of state information to each GET/POST request. If you want the preferences to persist after you close and re-open your browser you have to have the user log in every time and store the prefs on the server or store the prefs on the client side in a cookie like Google does. This simple fact seems to fly right over the head of google-watch.org and their ridiculous cookie conspiracy theories.
But hey, we've been over this in every Google story since the anti-Google FUD crowd started coming out of the woodwork. Here's a thought: if you really need a tinfoil hat then disable cookies, don't use Orkut and sleep better at night. But please stop subjecting people to google-watch.org FUD.
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