Peter's Blog

Installed the coolest new geek toy Google Desktop Search. This is essentially an indexer that will index your:

• text files (including python source)
• word documents
• excel documents
• email (outlook/outlook express only)
• Instant Messaging (kiddies toys)

You can then search for files in IE/Firefox exactly as you would if searching the internet. It even taps into your internet google searching and adds things it finds on your desktop to your google search results (magic).

My thoughts on this:

• Showing results in a browser is not always useful. You can click on the links and open the file but this runs the default 'open' action which for python scripts is to run them. I almost always want to open them in vim. I guess I'll have to reprogram the 'open' action. Still, makes me wish explorer search worked like this.
• How does it compare to the indexing service built into win2k/XP? I've never bothered much with this. The XP one has had the paperclip team working to make it flashy and useless but you can set it to do a plain grep like win2k. It only shows file names in results, it won't show context like google desktop search. Any new search killer app that ms bring out or build into longhorn is likely to be equally reliant on writing complex filters with a billion COM interfaces to search through new file types.
• It didn't index my drupal .module files. I'll try defining a .module extension in windows to see if google search picks them up or if it is just internally restricted in which file extensions it will index. There's nothing obvious in the registry to add file types.
• It may tempt me back to using outlook as an email client. It will search and properly thread emails. I have always found outlooks searching too slow to be useful (I have 400M email archives full of big attachments).
• If it could index the company intranet it would be very useful. The intranet's search facility is broken and the admin doesn't know how to fix it. The Intranet is laid out in a poorly organised manner and is simply a load of links to word documents on the company file server, which themselves are laid out on the file server in a poorly organised manner.
• I had to install Win2k Service Pack 4 to get it to install.