Google Desktop 2 Live 275
An anonymous reader writes "Combining desktop search and the Google Sidebar, Google Desktop 2 is now available for download. Dozens of new third-party sidebar panels are now available, Google said. Also launched was Google Desktop for Enterprise (free)."
Uh, hasn't it been out since August? (Score:1, Informative)
Slick... very slick (Score:5, Informative)
As I said, some simple tools, but helpful, and well organised. As for the desktop search itself, we can now specify network drives to index which is really cool for the dis-organised mess of nested folders that is my corporate drive. Gmail search can't get through my firewall unfortunately. The News search is great, it seems to have figured out my habits from history - I haven't visited any news sites except slashdot since installing and it's already got some new stories from my favourite sites... Plus some seemingly random interesting maps and blogs... no doubt these will cancel out any gains to my productivity made by ease of finding things:)
So all in all, first impression is a good one.
btw, does anyone know a way to create a firefox keyword to search the with this? It seems to need a session id to work, but maybe there's a way round?
Re:Yes but... (Score:1, Informative)
Hmm (Score:2, Informative)
I thought those days were over.
Re:won't install for me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Does anyone actually USE Google Desktop? (Score:5, Informative)
That said, I spend almost all my time on my Mac, so I have Spotlight.
I LOVE Spotlight.
With a quick key combination (based on keyboard placement, it would be like Alt-Space in the windows world) and then just type in stuff. The name of a document. A person's name. The name of an appointment. The name of a bookmark. The name of a folder. Some text in a document that I can't remember the name of. The name of a function in one of my programming projects (then just chose the header file it finds). It is fantastic. I even use it to launch programs (although I would prefer a version of the Run command in Windows, that is the one thing I miss). I know about Quicksilver and such but Spotlight works well enough for this.
It does seem to have gotten faster with the 10.4.3 update as well. Before sometimes I could type something in and it would take 15+ seconds for the first result to show up (this is a 1.677 GHz PB with 1GB of RAM), now the first results are always there in under a second (note, internal hard drive only; I don't know how it'd deal with multiple 800GB volumes some people use).
If you get Google Desktop and start using it, I think you'll love it (note: I've turned off the sidebar, just seems annoying to me). All it needs is a key command (Win-G maybe?) to launch it (note: might exist, haven't looked). While not as convenient as Spotlight (Google Desktop pulls up a web browser then you have to click, with spotlight I can use arrow keys, return, and various key combos), it will still be a major boon to you.
Now I'm a VERY organized person, and I still am. But now I can find that document by typing a few letters, instead of opening a few folders.
And if you accidently save something to the wrong place, it can be a GODSEND in finding it.
Re:Slick... very slick (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Slick... very slick (Score:3, Informative)
I just made a GDS "Quick Search" for Firefox. Here's what I did:
1) Do a blank search with GDS in Firefox.
2) Bookmark it and open up its properties page.
3) The URL should look something like this --> http://127.0.0.1:4664/search&s=FGJsWAKx2-kWjzxnpd
4) Insert a "%s" after the "q=" in the URL.
5) Enter something memorable in the Keyword box (I used "gd")
6) Look here for clarification --> http://filebox.vt.edu/s/seiglert/images/clipboard
Now, whenever you want to search for something on your desktop in Firefox, just go to the Address bar, and type "gd" and whatever you want to search for!
--Acercanto
Re:Why not just use a browser? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google desktop (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Google desktop (Score:2, Informative)
But then I saw a colleague at work using it and saw how it could be very helpful in that environment. Being an IT consultant, just about all of my work related communications occur via email (Exchange), web browsing, PDF's and Office documents on my laptop. Google Desktop indexes *all* this information, making it very fast and easy to search it at whim, which I often have to do. The ability to search all of these sources of information at once is extremely helpful.
You can turn the dodgy sidebar off and just have a small text input area in the Windows task bar, or access the search interface through your web browser.
Often I work at customer sites and aren't able to connect my laptop to the internet. At these times I've found Google Desktop's cache to be very handy.
But I still can't see much use for it on my home PC
Re:Slick... very slick (Score:2, Informative)
Today was my first experience with GDS. (I never installed the first version because it didn't support any of the file formats that I cared about.)
I did NOT want it to index my mail (I already use gmail)
I did NOT want it to index my web history (there could be dangerous things hiding in there)
I did NOT want it to index my C: drive (I don't store any data there)
All I wanted to do was to index one folder - my ebook collection. Mostly pdf and chm.
Getting GDS to index only a specific folder requires an extension [podsync.com]!
Getting it to index chm requires yet another extension.
Getting it to actually get on with the damn indexing requires you to sit quietly and wait until idle trigger kicks in - with no way to force it (that I could find). 3 hours later it has only indexed less than 200 books.
Search results are poor. Searching for "snort" shows "Mastering FreeBSD and OpenBSD Security" ahead of "Snort Cookbook". I can do better with filename-based searching!
Very underwhelmed...
Re:Scripting Plug-ins with Javascript - the new VB (Score:2, Informative)
Javascript is a much maligned language that is actually pretty powerful.
I've been toying around with XUL applications on Mozilla and have been learning alot about the power of the language.
I think it's humble beginnings have stereotyped it as a toy, while the reality is that it's extremely powerful and flexible.
The new ECMA 357 [ecma-international.org] spec is pretty interesting, too.
Re:Slick... very slick (Score:2, Informative)
First of all, on the preferences page, I clicked on the "Advanced Features" link to see what exactly these advanced features were. This checked the "Advanced Features" checkbox and immediately forwarded me to a page that explained that I would be sending usage info to google. No other info was available there. So, it appears that the "advanced feature" option is a synonym for an "enable spyware" option. No other benefits are explained.
Secondly, I get these obnoxious pop ups when new mail arrives, which duplicates the functionality of Outlook 2003 to no benefit. There is no option to turn it off on the preferences page that I can see. There is a preferences page that you can access from the pop-up window, unfortunately though, changes I make there don't get saved.
My last complaint is only due to me trying to give the software a fair chance. My inclination is to uninstall it now, but I figured I would let it finish indexing and run a few searches. Who knows, I may be impressed, but the indexing is taking forever. and I'm about ready to give up on it.