O'Reilly Network: Google Your Desktop
Is this technology such a big deal? For me it is. There are so many documents that I have accumalated over the past year that I did not know I had. Previously it was too much of a pain to go look where on my hard drive these docs were. Scanning through emails, and documents was not something I even considered. Just doing some trial searches I was able to pull up documents that I had forgotten about. With GDS I was able to access information that I had meant to access later, but never bothered. So is google desktop a big deal? Yes, but not because it is google search or anything, its because it is so easy to use. Click on the task bar and up pops the search window in a browser. Type your term, click search, and you have results. Fast, easy, and relevant results (so far). Thats why it is such a big deal. Your computer is no longer a reservior of forgotten documents. Wish it worked with software other than Microsofts though. Hopefully that will change.
Ok so how different is this from the various search tools. Much easier to use than the Microsoft Search feature in XP. Better than locate/find/grep tools in Linux because it has an interface that is easy to access, and you use every day. Users are more familiar with the tool. Results can be easily accessed through the browser with a click. Thats all I can think of for now.
There are so many apps I use these days that are from Google:
1. Google Search
2. Google Blogger
3. Google Mail
4. Google Desktop Search
5. Picasa
The apps from Google are true innovations. The moment I saw Gmail I moved to it, just because it was so much better than hotmail. Thats how you get users to shift I guess. You create revolutionary software. The only innovation I remember from Microsoft is the new outlook 2003 interface. So Google 5, Microsoft 1. :)
