Google my... laptop!?! (Sunday, October 24, 2004)
Ok, we all do it. I'm talking about Googling... the art of searching the web for something a la Google. I must do it a million times a day, mostly just to see if a certain section of my website has been cataloged by Google's crawler (ahem... come on guys). Heck, I even have it set as my home page for my favorite browser in the world.
But what's this? I can Google my laptop? That's just creepy... at least that was my first impression. But tonight I downloaded it. What could it hurt? And I am very amazed. A simple search for my name, and in the blink of an eye (literally) I had 96 results. Wow. That's all I could say (just ask Sarah). And imagine my surprise after a search for my friend Craig's name, a copy of my resume came up (as I have him listed as a reference). That's right, it'll not only search file names (like Windows Search), but also file contents! Something I've been able to do on my FreeBSD machine, but until now have not been able to do on my laptop.
It's a shame, however, that I can't take full advantage of it. Presently it only indexes sites visited with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and emails sent and received with either Outlook or Outlook Express. Unfortunately I use neither (actually that may be fortunately). And I don't have AOL Instant Messenger archive conversations. So that immediately removes 3 search mediums. But it's being said that Google is working on additional "compatability". I can't wait to see the day that this thing will search through my history in Firefox, and allow me to easily search for a term in the many hundreds of emails that lurk in Thunderbird...
Anyways, take a trip on over to our forums, where we currently have a poll running on what you think about Google Desktop Search.
Well, that's about all I have for now. Feel free to leave your comments and/or experiences in our forums. If you'd care to download Google Desktop Search, you can visit their site at http://desktop.google.com.
-Aaron
posted by Aaron and Sarah at 11:16 PM
If you think our blog is cool, you should see our forums!