Google Desktop
If there is one thing I love about broadband Internet access, it is the freedom to download and tryout a variety of new (and free) software. One of my recent favourites is the new Google Desktop search tool. Much like its predecessor, this is a very good search tool indexing media files, documents, emails, and chat transcripts. Finding files is now only seconds away, which is not always the case when using Windows native search function.
Version two of Google Desktop, however, goes beyond the realms of search. Gone is the cute little icon that sits on your system tray, waiting for you to double click when you are trying to find a file in your local machine. The new version comes with a sidebar that integrates the search function with a RSS newsreader, a email indexer that provides previews to emails that you’ve received (text only) and Google’s own News index.
What it ultimately means is that the user has access to a world of information at his/her fingertips. You can customize the sidebar so that the information that is presented relates directly to your area of interest. If you look at the screenshot below, you’ll notice the Newsreader (under ‘Web Clips’) holds information relating to cricket. That is because I’ve loaded the RSS feeds of Cricinfo and BBC Cricket into it. Every time those pages are updated, I’ll be immediately notified. Its also a great way of keeping updated with your favourite blogs.
The email archive is a funny tool that I haven’t still worked out. It does a good job at indexing email that you receive on your computer, provided that you use a local email client such as Outlook or Outlook Express. The client also has to be opened for the index to be updated immediately. Once its updated, and assuming that the email is in text format, you can preview the email simply by clicking the respective item. This doesn’t happen all the time though and its something that I am looking into.
The email tool is also supposed to archive your Gmail. According to the index status page on my sidebar, it is still in the process of archiving mine. That makes it two months and counting.
The search function itself works like a charm and is well on its way to making the native search function of Windows obsolete (Of course a certain Bill Gates will make sure that doesn’t happen). The searches are performed at super-fast speeds and are very accurate. Also if you know your way around using Google search operators such as ‘filetype:’ etc, the process becomes even easier. I’ve only encountered problems with the searching of video files, which supposedly works, but apparently not for me.
Oh well, nothing is perfect I guess.
