Google Desktop Search

Good morning world! Is there any better time to blog than an early sunday morning? Well, probably, but...

I downloaded the Google Desktop Search engine yesterday and I really like it. If you haven’t heard of it, the engine indexes your hard drive like Google indexes the web and lets you search through your documents for stuff. And a lot of what I do makes text on my hard drive proliferate, so this is handy.

Yes, it is very fast.

Yes, you can search for unicode strings (woohoo!).

Unfortunately, you cannot specify what file types it will search. I really want it to index my c# code files and my xml files, but those aren’t supported yet.

And, fortunately, it will only index your computer when it is completely idle. I even think it waits for it to be idle for a while before it starts indexing. I was trying to watch how fast it was by keeping the search open and occassionally refreshing the page, but it didn’t index anything new while I sat there and watched. I guess I was refreshing too often. But, eventually it kicked in. So, what this means is that it shouldn’t impact your computer’s performance, which is obviously a good thing.

Yes, it is browser based like the real google.

Yes, it is a quick and easy install.

That about sums up my thought on the issue. I highly recommend it for those whom have lots of stuff in documents and text files.