Google Desktop For Mac Has Arrived
The first public beta of Google Desktop for Mac has arrived, providing integrated searching of local files and the web.
“[W]e took the time to develop a product that deeply integrates into Mac OS X and maintains its high standards of usability,” wrote Google software engineer Mike Pinkerton in the company’s Mac blog. “This is a Mac product through and through, from the bezel on our search box down to correctly (and securely) handling multiple users and FileVault.”
Full text searches are supported for many file types include text, PDF, HTML, email (Mail, Entourage), iChat transcripts, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, music and video files, and Address Book contacts. The program also searches file and folder names.
The top results appear in a list beneath the search box, and the complete results can be seen in the traditional Google format in a browser. This is sufficiently similar to Spotlight (Apple’s own desktop search tool that is a part of Mac OS X 10.4) that users should have no problem adapting. Instead of typing command-space to open Spotlight, tap the command key twice to activate Google Desktop.
Google Desktop provides a degree of integration with Spotlight, taking advantage of any installed Spotlight importers to broaden the range of file types that can be searched. It also uses the Spotlight privacy list to determine which items should not be searched. The first version of Google Desktop does not appear to be able to index PC-formatted drives.
Spotlight’s performance is lacking on single core hardware. It begins searching as soon as the user starts typing the search terms, chewing up CPU power and making the user interface unresponsive while the ‘spinning beachball’ appears. Google Desktop does the same partial word searches during entry, but without the stuttering that can make Spotlight frustrating. Google Desktop also returns results more quickly than Spotlight does.
Google Desktop searches messages stored in a Gmail account and your web history. The program indexes web pages as you visit them, making it easier to return to that piece of information that you saw recently but can’t remember where. Pages using https can be excluded from indexing.
Documents are cached when you view them, providing the possibility that Google Desktop will be able to retrieve an earlier revision of a file, or one that you’ve deleted. The initial beta does not provide any controls over the size of this cache.
Google Desktop also integrates with Google.com. The last item on a Desktop results list is “Search web for”, which triggers a normal Google search, and when you view the full results list in a browser the familiar links to image, news and other Google searches are present at the top of the page.
Other features of Google Desktop for Windows – notably gadgets – are promised for later versions of the Mac version.
Google Desktop installation is not an especially Mac-like process. The download link from Google’s web site actually downloads an application called Google Updater (1M), which in turn downloads and installs Google Desktop (2.8M) and optionally other software.
As the name implies, Google Updater can also update Google software already installed on the computer.
Like any search program that indexes files, it takes Google Desktop some time to create the initial index, so don’t be surprised if it doesn’t immediately find documents you know are somewhere on your hard disk.
via [ITWire]
