Google Takes over the Desktop
Google (god, I love them) has just released a new piece of great software, Google Desktop Search. The software, still in beta, is designed to allow searching of your local PC as easily as you can Google up a webpage. You download the program to your computer and it runs in your taskbar so that you can seach your PC at any time with a single click. Initially, it must index your files, which can take some time if you’re sporting a 250 GB hard drive like I do. Once finished indexing, you are ready to Google your computer.
The Google Desktop Search page looks very similar to the regular Google page, so to say it’s easy to use is quite the understatement. You can officially say goodbye to Window’s built-in search technology now, because this is much, much better. (Never again will a stupid little dog ask you what you are looking for today!) Also, unlike Windows’ search, Google Desktop Search not only indexes your Word and Excel documents and the like, it will pull up your emails, pages from your browser’s cache, and your chat sessions. (For the complete list of what it indexes, click here).
To some its ability to pull up a personal email or a cached website is a privacy concern. People who share a computer with others may not want them looking at their files, emails and chats, and should probably steer clear of using this program. However, personally, I have no problem with my husband reading any of my emails or viewing my web history, so I’m looking forward to using this program.
In addition to my joy over this program, I also just discovered Google Scholar, which is a free
service that helps you search scholarly literature such as
peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical
reports. Where was this when I was in college?! I’m so jealous!
Truly, the world of Google simply amazes me. Not only does the technology impress, function, and delight, it’s incredibly useful, and there is always something new being released. Google is the future of the internet, the future of search, and, quite frankly, I don’t know how I ever lived without it. That’s it, I’m off to by some Google stock.
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I think you should change from web/tech category and add one dedicated to just google.
We’re all addicts.
Google is impressive because they’re not shy about doing what they need to do to attract the best creative geek minds and identify people that would be beneficial at advancing tech. Novell/Ximian is doing some similar things for encouraging programmers to think creatively.
All one really has to do is look at the GLAT to figure out why people who work for Google are a more than a little different than your average geek.
Take a look here
My favorite: “Write a haiku describing possible methods for predicting search traffic seasonality.”