From: Janis, Barbara (BJanis@presidiotrust.gov)
Date: Thu Oct 21 2004 - 10:22:29 PDT
Message-ID: <9BFA13508B35D54EB70EDC28175B90A31102AA@EXCHANGEBE.presidiotrust.gov> From: "Janis, Barbara" <BJanis@presidiotrust.gov> Subject: RE: SLA-SF: NYTimes.com Article: State of the Art: Google Takes O n Your Desktop Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 10:22:29 -0700
Certainly, something to watch!
Barbara
Barbara Janis, M.L.I.S.
Library Manager
Presidio Trust
P. O. Box 29052
San Francisco, CA 94129-0052
Phone: 415-561-5343
Fax: 415-561-5315
-----Original Message-----
From: sklorma@sandia.gov [mailto:sklorma@sandia.gov]
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2004 7:19 AM
To: SLA-SF@exploratorium.edu
Subject: SLA-SF: NYTimes.com Article: State of the Art: Google Takes On Your
Desktop
The article below from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by sklorma@sandia.gov.
Interesting developments.....
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State of the Art: Google Takes On Your Desktop
October 21, 2004
By DAVID POGUE
THE modern PC is a marvel, isn't it? Here's a machine that
lets an ordinary person with very little training create a
new document, check its spelling, dress it up with
graphics, send it electronically to someone across the
globe - and then save it accidentally into some dark corner
of the hard drive, where it will never be seen again.
Of course, every operating system offers a Find command.
But the one in Windows is not, ahem, Microsoft's finest
work. It requires too many clicks, it asks too many
questions, it takes forever, it can't search your e-mail
and its results are difficult to interpret. As a final
insult, Microsoft endowed the supposedly ultramodern
Windows XP with a cartoon dog that appears during the
searching, as though to say, "We know this is taking a long
time, but hey, watch the puppy!"
Google showed the world what great searching could look
like: incredibly fast, blessedly simple, attractively
designed. Unfortunately, it could only search the Web. To
search your own files, you had to turn, reluctantly, back
to Windows and its dog-slow mutt.
No longer. Last week, Google took the wraps off its latest
invention: Google Desktop Search. As the name implies, it's
software that applies the famous Google search technology
to the stuff on your own hard drive. It's free, it's
available right now for Windows XP and 2000
(desktop.google.com), and it's terrific.
Like the Windows search program, Google Desktop can find
files by name, including photos, music files and so on. But
it can also search for words inside your files, including
Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. That's a relief when
you can't remember what you named a file, but you do
remember what it was about - or when a marauding toddler
renamed your doctoral thesis "xggrjpO#$5////." (Windows
offers this feature, too, but it's hard to find, hard to
turn on and poorly documented.)
For its final trick, Google Desktop does something so
profound it may change the way you think about your PC
forever: It can search any Web page you've ever seen, any
e-mail message you've opened and the transcript of any
instant-message chat you've had.
Why is this such a life-changing feature? Because using a
computer these days means being bombarded with far too much
information to remember. Google Desktop effectively becomes
a sort of aircraft black box for your PC - a photographic
memory, as Google puts it. The program can recall any bit
of text that ever passed in front of your eyeballs, in a
fraction of a second. You don't even have to remember where
you read something (e-mail, Web, instant message,
document); you have to remember only what it was about.
This feature, as they say in Silicon Valley, is huge.
"All right," you're probably thinking, "down, boy. There's
got to be a catch." No, there are no catches. There is,
however, quite a long list of footnotes.
For starters, Google Desktop is officially in beta testing,
meaning that Google doesn't consider it to be finished. For
the moment, its greatest limitation is the list of programs
it recognizes. At this point, it can't search Acrobat (PDF)
files except by file name. It can't search Web pages you've
visited unless Internet Explorer is your browser, chat
sessions unless you use AOL Instant Messenger, or e-mail
unless you use Outlook or Outlook Express. If you don't use
these programs, Google Desktop will seem a lot less
essential.
Another consideration: Google Desktop Search is remarkable
in the compactness of its code - the entire program fits in
a 446-kilobyte download - but installing it requires at
least one gigabyte of free hard-drive space. That's
because, like similar programs, Google Desktop works by
creating what's called an index: a multimegabyte database
of the words in all your files. To search vast amounts of
material, it needs a healthy swath of space for its index.
Creating its index file isn't what you'd call
instantaneous, either. In fact, Google Desktop takes
between five hours and all day to build its index. (The
instant you start doing work on the PC, the Google indexer
immediately backs off. That means your PC never slows down
indexing, but it also means that Google Desktop takes
longer to index than some of its rivals do.)
Once the index is built, Google maintains it by logging
every document and message you open, every Web page you
visit and every instant-message session you conduct.
Fortunately, Google Desktop's system-tray logo harbors a
handy Pause Indexing command, which you can use while you
work on something that you'd rather not make searchable
(midnight chatters, you know who you are). Like the Snooze
button on an alarm clock, it offers to resume indexing
every 15 minutes, so you don't forget.
You can fire up Google Desktop for a search in either of
two ways. First, you can double-click on its system-tray
icon. In a moment, you find yourself in your Web browser,
confronting what looks at first like Google.com. But if you
type in a search phrase and click on Search Desktop, you
get a tidy list of matching items, each identified with a
little icon. (When the match is a Web page you've visited,
you actually see a miniature picture of it.)
You can click on anything in the results list to open the
corresponding file, message, Web page or transcript. The
process looks and feels like a standard Google search, a
comfortable familiarity that means you have little new to
learn.
The other way to use Google Desktop is a little freakier.
Whenever you use the regular Google to search the Web, the
results list includes a new link that says, "78 more
results found on your computer." In other words, whenever
you conduct a Google search, your query is sent
simultaneously to Google (to search online) and to Google
Desktop (to search your PC), for your convenience.
However disconcerting it may be to see results from the Web
and from your own computer in such close proximity, Google
says that your desktop-only queries and their results are
never sent to Google; the fact that Google Desktop does not
require an Internet connection supports that assertion.
Speaking of privacy, you can also turn off any of the
searchable item types. If, for example, you'd rather not
make your Web-surfing sessions available for searching by
other family members, turn off that feature. You can also
omit only secure Web pages from the log, so that your
banking and stock transactions aren't available for recall.
(Even so, corporations should carefully consider the
security ramifications of Google Desktop's logging
features.)
Now, both Microsoft and Apple have announced that their
next operating systems (Windows Longhorn in 2006 and Mac OS
X Tiger in 2005) will include tools promising the same kind
of speedy system-wide searches as Google Desktop; clearly,
the Ph.D.'s at Google weren't alone in recognizing that
today's searching programs don't cut it.
But already, Google Desktop Search has many rivals. Lookout
(www.lookoutsoft.com), for example, is a free- add-on for
Microsoft Outlook that can search not only your e-mail but
also your address book, calendar, e-mail attachments and
even files on your hard drive. Microsoft liked it so much
that it bought the company.
There's more power and flexibility to be had in programs
like Blinkx (www.blinkx.com, free), Lycos Hotbot Desktop
(www.hotbot.com/tools, free), Enfish (www.enfish.com, $50
and $200) and DT Search (www
.dtsearch.com, $200). For example, these programs can
search more kinds of files than Google Desktop. Whereas
Google searches only your main (C:) hard drive, its rivals
can search secondary drives and removable disks (like
CD's), and the expensive ones can even search other
computers on your network. Most come in free trial
versions, so if you're Google-phobic, by all means give
them a shot.
You'll learn from the experiment, though: with great power
comes great interface clutter. Few of those rivals can
touch the familiarity, speed and simplicity of Google
Desktop, and they don't offer Google's delicious
photographic-memory feature. If you use Windows XP or 2000
- and especially if you use Outlook, Outlook Express,
Internet Explorer or AOL Instant Messenger - download
Google Desktop Search. You have nothing to lose but Fido
the Time-Killing Windows Dog.
E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/21/technology/circuits/21stat.html?ex=1099368
358&ei=1&en=af5412931ece78ac
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