| The more cynical among us, myself included, might stop at this point and say, "Isn't searching your desktop something that the operating system should have done to begin with?" Well, yes and no. The best instance of desktop searching, sans-Google, comes from Apple's Mac OS and Sherlock. And Microsoft is supposedly working on integrating search with the next version of Windows, which should be available next year--or maybe the year after that, or maybe by the time George Bush leaves office. Even then, will these OS-based search tools displace Google Desktop? I don't think so. They will never be able to combine the power of local search with the power of an Internet search engine like Google. |
Another major Google Desktop limitation concerns scope. Its ability to specify how much content is indexed is pretty crude. You either index all your e-mails or none of them. You can either collect all Word documents or none of them. (A more tunable desktop search software is available free from Copernic.com, as an example.) The only real control you have is on a directory-by-directory basis, which is fine if you have organized your data carefully within directories. But that won't work if you have stuff scattered all over your hard disk, or if you are like most users and don't necessarily know where things get stored on your computer once they leave the comfy digs of "My Documents" and venture out into the cold, cruel world of C:\.
Come to think of it, that is why you need to use Google Desktop to begin with--to find your stuff. Assuming you've got the right content and applications, you'll find Google Desktop a welcome addition to your desktop. I recommend the software and suggest you give it a try.
David Strom is the online editor of the Electronics Group and in charge of that group's Web strategies. He was the founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing and is author of two books on computing networking. Strom writes a weekly column called Web Informant that is available in various online locations. Until using Google Desktop, he thought he was fairly organized about keeping his file collection. He can be reached at [email protected].
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