Google Releases GDS 2.0

FansofTech writes "Google (now $4bn richer) has released v2.0 of Google Desktop. Many new features are introduced including improved Outlook filtering, Gmail indexing, and the feature which is most likely to cause the largest stir...a new Sidebar which displays RSS feeds, a Gmail inbox, news, scratch pad and more. Plug-ins for the new Sidebar are also available including a to-do list, clock, and more. As one blogger pointed out this morning...the release of Google Desktop 2.0 is beginning to take shape as a browser in itself as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated."

I'd hate to burst your bubble...

[LegendOfLink]

as the need for a Firefox or IE is almost eliminated...

I'm not really sure who uses Google Desktop; I certainly don't. I had the last version for about a week, and then I got bored with it. This is true for about 90% of the things I find online. Plus, what Google is doing now is starting to be the same thing Microsoft has been doing for the last few years: trying to get their hands into everything.

It's only a matter of time and probable lawsuits before the geek community starts to have a little falling out over this love affair we all seem to have with Google.

*Year 2007: Commence with the pie'ing Paige and Brin jokes.

Privacy Issues

[AlexTheBeast]

I am not a huge privacy kind of guy, but google is getting a little crazy with what they save about you now.

They are now recording click-throughs on their search pages. [boingboing.net] Why do they need this information? It wasn't too long ago that links on google.com went straight to the link... not back through the google servers...

Just remember to clean out your google desktop index history [tech-recipes.com].

Is our privacy now worth more than free software?

(Tin-foil hat mode off)

Dashboard

[sedyn]

Does the functionality of this program remind anyone else of dashboard for OSX?

Speaking of, widgets seem to be all the rage at the moment. Do they have any standards (other than program APIs), for say, the sake of portibility? Or would that be pointless?

I ask that because there seems to be a lot of duplication of functions (such as local weather) between various applications.

Maybe obvious....

[rwven]

Sounds (again) like Google is planning on getting into the browser/mail-client business. I think a new windows Shell developed by Google would be a nice hit too...but i wouldnt put too much hope in that idea coming through...

Search more than 1 notes database..

[Destoo]

I want to be able to search more than one lotus notes Databases, if that's not too much to ask.

The plugin we have will only search one, usually the mail file..
I'd like it to search my 5 archive files also.

Thank you.

Is it going to index my Outlook mail on Exchange?

[HawkinsD]

I can't tell from my cursory review of the web page... So I'll ask here: The Google Desktop Search engine claims to index my "Outlook EMail." What does this mean? Does it contain an Exchange client? Is it going to sift through all my eleventy-million e-mails on my company's Exchange server?

If so: is this a good idea? What will my Exchange administrator think about this? What if lots of us start doing this? Exchange servers are notoriously flaky.

I would sure love to have a quick way to search for the butt-covering e-mail that I sent to Finster a year ago.

Data being passed back to Google?

[passionplay]

So does anyone have any news on what information is being passed back to Google or what security settings to choose so that my privacy stays intact? Or is this one of those situations where you have go "give up a little freedom" for "increased convenience" a la "giving up a little freedom" for "increased safety and security?? Thanks.

Integrating with Spotlight?

[amonredotorg]

Now that Google Desktop does more than just searching, I wonder how long it takes before Google attempts conquering Mac OS X by having Google Desktop integrate with Spotlight! :D Or is that a silly thought? Hmmm.

It still sits in the middle of your TCP stack

[joshrulzzatwork]

No one has posted yet, so either /. is borked or you guys are all hard at work, heh.

Reading over their developer site (http://desktop.google.com/queryapi.html [google.com]), it looks like the engine still listens on the same port the first version did, so I am guessing it still sits in the middle of the Windows TCP/DNS stack so that when you go to the normal Google homepage, you see the desktop search choice, and results from your own desktop. I would rather GDS run as a process that searches my drive, listen on a port for my brower to post a search to, and then dump the results back to a browser window. The page I linked basically describes that, however without installing, I can't tell if they still incorporate themselves into their internet site.

After playing with version 1 last year, I gave http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search / [copernic.com]Copernic DS a shot, and have been happy with it. It's fast, has its own UI so it doesn't have to hook into how Windows talks to the web to let me use it, and it indexes IM conversations (athlough you have to manually point its indexer to your chat log directory). My main complaint in memory use. At my previous job, it could take up to 120 megs of memory. Here, where I have been for only 2 months, it uses around 35.

Spyware

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

and you'll all be sorry!

Trust me on this one, boys. You'll be like Mr. Buttle in no more than ten-years time, wondering, "Why'd they get me? I never did anything wrong..."

Google is not cool, Google is not your "friend." Google is the NSA.

Spotlight

[alanoneil]

Google Desktop appears to include some kind of "Live Search" functionality, bringing Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's "Spotlight" experience to Windows.

I wonder how it'll fare in terms of integration-- Spotlight gets updated whenever you touch a file (giving always-live info, but at the expense of constant DB updates). GD claims (FAQ [google.com]) to update the DB only when the computer is not in use (removing the performance drag some people experience with Spotlight, but at the expense of missing recent files).

Any current users of both GD on Windows and Spotlight on Tiger that care to compare?

Requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly I won't be testing it today. Seriously though - this is where Google have done things right until now, offering universally available services through an ordinary web browser. Why the sudden direction towards desktop apps?

Include a calendar

[fluor2]

Dear Google. Include a calendar, and I can finally get rid of this sh*t called Outlook.

Re:Privacy Issues

[jeremy_a]

>> What better way to rank a page's relevancy than by determining which links are chosen by the searchers for a given keyword or set of keywords?

> bad side effect...

> page 1 & 2 search results will firmly become engrained there by this method as everyone clicks on the top few results normally

That could be a problem if the results fed directly into the page rank. But it would seem more logical to use this to cull bad links from the top 10. If people consistenly ignore the first link for a particular search, but instead click on the second or third links, it would be a good indication that the top link isn't very good and should be moved down the list, which could in turn allow a new link to bubble up to the top 10.

MOD PARENT UP!

[jkrise]

Why is this funny? That's 1 user who's got the guts to post his opinion about social engineering going on in this site, and it gets modded funny! Read my first journal on this subject and mod the parent up so it gets seen prominently.

Cheers

Netscape Desktop Part Two?

[gsa700]

This sounds a lot like that Netscape Desktop thing that never actually made it out the door. Constellation was it? Around 1997 I sent an email to a Netscape engineer and told him I thought they should make Netscape into a shell for linux and he replied that I wasn't alone and to keep my eye's open. Maybe this is finally it!

RSS w/o user intervention

[_Shorty-dammit]

actually, according to their docs, this new version gives users RSS feeds without the user even having to know wtf RSS is. It automatically sets the stuff up for you. So it isn't just another RSS feed reader, the feature sounds like it'd be rather handy and I don't know of any other doing this.

re: overexposure

[King_TJ]

I tend to agree with your basic premise that a toolbar might not really be the ideal direction for Google - at least, if you want to see them remain known for their stark, but useful/powerful web pages.

But my main issue with toolbars are the fact that by their nature, they're gaudy "OS hacks". In essense, every time you see a "toolbar" on a system, it's a 3rd. party "after the fact" workaround for a perceived lack/failing of the OS itself.

A "system utility", "accessory" or "application", by contrast, would be a program that sits on the hard drive someplace and isn't seen or heard from until you specifically launch it.

You recently saw this illustrated in Mac OS X with all the whining over Apple's inclusion of the new "Dashboard" feature in v10.4. (Basically, it was amazingly similar in concept and execution to a shareware app that existed long before.) But ultimately, you see Dashboard winning people over. Why? Because obviously, it's a better situation to have such a thing integrated into the OS itself, even if it has some weaknesses compared to the 3rd. party "add ons". For starters, it's a "level playing field" because *all* users of that version of the OS have the same tool. You also have one less product on your computer supported by a separate party - so less chance of it suddenly becoming "unsupported" or incompatible, forcing you to wait for a fix.

I'm not necessarily against placing items of potential interest right on the user's desktop. I think the Windows clock in the taskbar is perfectly fine and unobtrusive. If people don't think to look at it when they want to know what time it is, well .... that's probably just because it is so unobtrusive. But I've certainly used mine to see what time it is - and it's also a really quick way to realize if a given PC has an incorrectly set date/time which could cause strange errors in some applications.

Re:Browser need eliminated?

[isilrion]

And, of course, if you are really feeling geeky, you can launch python and
 
 

import libgmail
acc=libgmail.GmailAccount('username','pa ss')
acc.login()
msgs = acc.getMessagesByQuery('is:unread')
foreach thread in msgs:
    for msg in thread:
        print msg.source

Joking aside, I've had to do that. Very useful (and annoying) when you need to check your email, have no browser around, and you remember that you forgot *again* to enable pop3 in your gmail account.

Isilrion

P.S: Yes, that has happened!

Re:Browser need eliminated?

[Nasarius]

"Post Office Protocol", one large hack of an inadequate mess

You jest, but it's somewhat true. GMail provides over 2GB of storage now. They promote the idea of storing all your email forever. Why the heck don't they have an IMAP interface?