Looks like God^Hogle has extended its reach yet again, now letting us do Desktop Search. One thing they mention is "now you don't need to worry about where your files are stored!" Seems like the promise of WinFS but without being stuck within Longhorn.

Personally, I can't see myself moving away from maintaining a directory structure. Simply because if Google Desktop dies, how will I find my files? Maybe there will evolve the type of data recovery tools for Google Desktop like the ones which patch up your FAT or MFT when it gets damaged. But that extra layer of abstraction seems overkill.

Then, there's the tinfoil hat (which I don't wear) theory or Google extending its reach. It's got the whole web at its command, it's got all your vacation photos, it's got your e-mail, now will it get your documents too? And what if this public Google company has problems, might everything fall apart? Ah, I'm just speculating for kicks, really.

[Edit:]
Oh wait, it runs through your browser?? Now I have to put on my IT-administrator tinfoil hard-hat and ask, how long until someone writes a malicious BHO (browser helper object) or browser toolbar to latch onto Google Desktop and search your computer for "bank account number", "credit card number", "social security number", etc; sending anything it finds back to the malicious code's creator, of course. Oh, the Internet can be a scary place.

Yeah, it works well as long as you use Outlook and Internet Explorer. Anybody know of a better program that does the same thing? There must be one.

The in-browser local search feature apparently works in Firefox as well. If you read the HTML, you don't see anything that looks like a client-side include. Instead, it looks like they're trapping port 80 traffic to Google.com and inserting their own results. I haven't done a more detailed investigation, but I may assign some students to go look at it as a final project for my security course. Let's hear it for student labor.

WinFS isn't a feature of Longhorn. It's been pushed off till later (again). Microsoft has been trying for a long time to do what WinFS wants to do, dating back to some of the promises of NT 4, then NT 5...

If you want to see what Apple has working already, look at Spotlight. Or for a video demonstration, tune into this and go to the 0:42 mark. Make sure to watch the entire segment on Spotlight, as it shows some innovative uses of it beyond files.

What this does is actually quite useful. And none of it gets rid of a file structure. Instead, it very quickly allows me to find any document on my system that talks about the empeg, even if it is named 20394.doc, or if it is in my instant message logs.

The general thought behind this all is "Why can we get search results back from Google on things faster then finding files on our own systems?"

Sorry, I wasn't clear. It does not search the information that Firefox stores like it does for Internet Explorer, such as cached pages and favorites, and only searches in your email if you use Outlook, neither of which I use. So basically to me it is good for just a few filetypes, such as text and Doc files.

I like the idea though. I did some more research and I found two programs that do similiar things, but are perhaps a bit more mature at this point in time and can search through more types of files.

Blinkx which looks like it is free and
X1 which is not free but looks good anyway

I am hoping that they will add cached page searching for Firefox caches. I would DEARLY LOVE to make F/F cache HTML pages for something like 3 months and be able to search them easily. I am lax at bookmarking pages and often only vaugely recally certain words from a page I have visited in the recent past, and a regular Google search isn't enough to find it again.

Also Thunderbird mailbox searching would be good - I think they are standard mbox format so it should be fairly simple.

Then again there is no official Google Toolbar for Mozilla/FF so who knows?

Gareth

Support for mbox files would go a long way. It would cover Netscape/Mozilla/Thunderbird as well as Eudora and probably some other mailers as well. I imagine it's on the way, and maybe as part of the secretive, rumored gbrowser effort.

Hah, all you need to search a Eudora mailbox is Windows Find with something in the "Containing Text" box. Heck, that's all I need to search AIM logs, mIRC logs, Word docs (mostly), and HTML (mostly).

Give me something that (effortlessly) searches PDFs (and scanned-image PDFs, mmmmmm) and I'll be happy. There is that Adobe Library thing (or something), but it seems like a lot of work. Oh well, it's probably worth it.

I'm glad WinFS is being pushed back again. Nothing like adding unnecessary complexity to one of the foundations of the OS; the file system. WinFS is some kind of database thing, right? Oh imagine when someone creates the WinFSlammer worm. It'll do a lot worse than take down entire countries like SQLSlammer did (well, maybe "country" singular).

Quote:
trapping port 80 traffic to Google.com and inserting their own results.

Oh great, so it can insert AdWords (which, I admit, are the only helpful advertisements I've ever seen on the web). Or wait, is it the other way around? When you search google.com, it also searches your drive and returns your local results as well. That might be interesting, untill it gets annoying when I search google.com for "empeg" and it gives me 67 pages of results from my machine.

Hm... and I wonder if they will link Picasa and Google Desktop so GD can search image descriptions and folder names.....

Spotlight is pretty mush the only reason I want Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) right now. It has some other cool features, but this one is just too cool. I saw a live demo at the Apple Canada offices and I "got it" right away. The best part is that it will allow expansion for unrecognized file types relatively easily (for developers of those files/formats).

Bruno