Google To Launch Desktop Search Tool
from the well...-um...-of-course? dept
I assume this will surprise all of about three or four people who haven't been paying attention, but Google is preparing to launch a desktop search tool that will let you search through your own hard drive (in exchange, I assume, for contextual ads). The press will make a big deal about this and how it's a way for them to challenge Microsoft's Longhorn offering, which will have greatly improved local search. I'm not sure it's that interesting. Longhorn is so far off that it's really not worth speculating whether or not this product actually competes with it or not. The more interesting question is, if this local search tool involves contextual ads, will the privacy folks start complaining again that Google is now snooping through your hard drive?
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Desktop search?
Most of google's focus and technology today is in the ability to "spider" the internet, find relationships between documents, and extract the valuable information from mounds of junk and intentional attempts to increase the "page rank" of certain sites.
It's not clear to me how any of that technology translates to searching the local drive. Personally, I'm going to stick with Start->Search->For Files or Folders (or "find / -type f -print |xargs egrep ..." in Unix).
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Re: Desktop search?
I wonder if someone will create a "lite" version, similar to Kazaa Lite, that doesn't serve ads?
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Will it search through PDF files?
If this new Google product will search through PDF files, I'll be sure to get it.
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Re: Will it search through PDF files?
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Rest assured Mike ...
Why has it take Google so long to figure out that, while surfing HTML pages on the web is certainly useful ... being able to do the same type of search on my LAN (searching just my hard drive would be pointless since the only thing ON my hard drive are operating system files) would be INVALUABLE.
In other words, I WILL PAY A LOT OF MONEY for this capability, if it is executed properly.
Also, I will buy GOOGOL's of shares of stock (hope I don't get sued for using that word.)
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Re: Rest assured Mike ...
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Another idea retread.
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Google Announces Desktop Search
http://www.byronprather.com/PermaLink.aspx?guid=fd7871d8-65c6-4462-92d2-bd5a417d3adb
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