9483 Several weeks ago, Google released Google Desktop for the Mac, a somewhat lesser-featured Mac OS Universal counterpart to the Google Desktop for Windows search utility that's been available for some time. The Mac version is hardly a simple port of the Windows application, since it is engineered to tap into the Mac OS's Spotlight search technology, which of course Windows doesn't have.

However, the question is of course begged as to why we need Google Desktop when we already have Spotlight?

My short answer to that would be that while I've become addicted to Spotlight, and it gets harder and harder to imagine getting along without it, there is certainly plenty of room for improvement, and Google Desktop promises to do just that. I'm a big fan of Google's Web search engine. I like the way it works, its low overhead and relatively uncluttered interface, and my hope was that the general philosophy behind it would translate into searches of my hard drive using Google Desktop.

This week, Google released Google Desktop 1.0.1.126, a feature enhancement, optimization, and bugfix update of the original public beta. I decided it was time to download it and check it out.

Getting Google Desktop onto your hard drive is not as straightforward as it might be, requiring you to first download Google Updater, and then use it to download the Google Desktop application. However, the compressed disk image is a svelte 1 GB, so it all goes pretty quickly, even on a slow dialup connection like mine.

However, before it's fully functional, you have the indexing hill to climb. I hate indexing, and back in the OS 9 and early OS X days, always disabled file indexing for the OS's Find and Sherlock functions, and relied instead on third-party search utilities that didn't index. However, Spotlight roped me in, and I finally succumbed to the tediousness and performance penalty that indexing necessitates.

While, Google Desktop clones Spotlight's indexing configuration parameter (eg: exclusions), it wants to compile its own index, and that took a lot longer and was more obtrusive than I had anticipated. After you install Google Desktop, it starts indexing the files on your local volumes. According to Google, this one-time indexing is designed to peacefully coexist with your normal work, so you can continue working while indexing takes place. That turned out to be technically true, so long as one was content to have everything else happen at a snail's pace. This would no doubt be less of an issue or even a non-issue with a Core 2 Duo, but on my 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook everything got r e a l l y s l u g g i s h once the Google Desktop index run started. Thankfully, you can turn the indexing off using the Google Desktop preference panel, and I did that whenever I needed to actually work with my computer. Google optimistically says that "depending on how many files and other items you have on your computer, this process can take up to several hours. IN fact, what with starting and stopping the process sporadically,, the initial index of my main hard drive partition cumulatively took the better part of two days (I didn't leave it on overnight), and that was with the system files and applications , as well as sundry other stuff excluded from the index.

I also ran into some stability roughness. I attempted to add some data to the Spotlight privacy exclusion list while Google Desktop indexing was running, and that crashed the System Preferences Application, requiring the employment of Activity Monitor to kill the process, and bollixing the memory so badly that I had to reboot the computer.

Once it's done with the initial index, Desktop keeps your index up to date by adding new email as you receive it, files as you update them, web pages as you view them, and so forth. However, given the performance hit (for some reason it seems to really hobble Eudora) and stability issues, I've opted to keep Desktop indexing disabled most of the time and just let it do periodic update runs when I'm not very busy. Otherwise, it just slows things down unacceptably. Perhaps when I finally get an Intel Mac, I'll just leave it on all the time.

Setting grumbling aside for a bit, I'll now concentrate on some of the good stuff about Google Desktop for the Mac. First, I love the interface, both the way it looks, which is sharp, attractive, and contemporary in counterpoint to Spotlight's boring, dowdy, and unimaginative UI, and the way it works, which is as one would expect a Google-engineeered search engine to work, which is to say very well.

Google Desktop gives you an option of display its menu icon in the Dock, in the Menu bar or not at all. My Dock is always plenty fill enough, so I opted for the menu bar, which is crowded enough as well, but the lesser evil.

Actually, you can probably get along without it at all without any real hardship, since the Quick Search Box is most-conveniently summoned using a keyboard shortcut, of which the default is two clicks of the Command key. Works for me.

Unfortunately Google Desktop emulates Spotlight in starting searches as soon as you begin to type, which is another particular pain on slower computers. However, searches themselves seem very fast, with the results displayed in a drop-down menu in a familiar, Google-esque format.

Spotlight gives you more returns. A search for "Google Desktop" netted 447 results in Spotlight, and "just" 181 in Google Desktop itself, and Spotlight returned them faster, but I found Google Desktop's results more intelligible thanks to the little content preview snippets and file path info provided, whereas Spotlight just gives you filenames.

With Google Desktop you can view all results (if they all couldn't fit in the drop down, which they usually don't, at least in my searches) in a Web browser window on a typical-looking Google results webpage in your default browser, or to shift your search the to the Web.

An interesting feature Spotlight doesn't match is that Google Desktop can even search files that have been deleted from your hard drive, since Desktop creates a dedicated archive cache that retains information about files it has indexed. Consequently, you can often use Desktop to find previous versions of your files or ones you've accidentally deleted. This is cool in some respects, but I'm apprehensive about the size of Google's support files. Indeed, the size and modality of the way it archives information may well be the most "ugly" aspect Google Desktop of all. Google Desktop can also be configured to include one Gmail email account in its searches. You can even access your Gmail and web history while you're offline.

While Spotlight stores its index files on a per drive basis in relatively small, efficient files, Google Desktop's index files are much bigger and stored on the root drive, which means that if you move an external FireWire drive to another computer with Google Desktop, it will be necessary re-index the drive, and it will be out of sync with the indexes on other systems, which means Google Desktop be constantly re-indexing any external drives connected.

Happily, you can configure Google Desktop to not keep cached copies of deleted files, but there is no way of culling data already in the index.

When you visit Google.com with Google Desktop installed (and a supported browser) a new search parameter option called "Desktop" will be displayed, which means you can launch a search of your hard drive from a Web browser. This is pretty cool, and when you do a regular Google.com search it will also search your Mac's index for relevant results. Works with Safari and Camino (and presumably Firefox), but unfortunately not with Opera, which is my default browser.

So will I be keeping Google Desktop on my hard drive? I'm a search engine junkie, and I must have close to a dozen such search utilities loaded up, so why not another? Desktop is free, powerful, and offers features no other desktop search engine currently can match.

However, it's a resource hog. I'm inclined to work alternatively in different systems installed on separate partitions on my hard drive. Spotlight, I suppose, has created respective indices, and non-indexing search utilities can work from anywhere, but I'm not going to do with another Google Desktop indexing marathon for my other partition.

That there is the complexity. I strongly hew toward lightweight, self-contained, nimble, portable, and small computer applications - Tex Edit Plus; ToyViewer; Color It! 4.5, even Eudora is svelte and lively compared with other full-featured email client applications. Google Desktop itself is small, but it's operation ponderous and its index archives huge.

Google Desktop is certainly a jack-of-all-trades, and it would be unfair to add the "and master of none" corollary, because the program actually does what it does quite masterfully. However, I also philosophically tend to prefer single or narrow-purpose tools, whether it be for auto mechanics, woodworking, or data searching. If I want to search the Web, a browser and Google.com does any of the job nicely. If I want to search my email archives, Eudora has a fast and efficient search engine. Having it all in one application may sometimes be convenient, but I take a compartmentalized approach to life, and can find a widely targeted address distracting.

My main task for Google Desktop is to search the files on my hard drive, and for that, when a quick resort to Spotlight doesn't turn up what I'm looking for, I have found that the most useful alternative is a little freeware utility called SpotInside, which piggy-backs on Spotlight and papers over many of its shortcomings.

For some reason, I'm not sure exactly why, SpotInside tends to turn up the most useful collection of results for my purposes of any search utility I've yet tried, and displays them in a very convenient fashion. Most of the time, I find it the most helpful tool for the sort of content searching I do, and it does its thing using minimal system resources.

The greatest thing about SpotInside is that it searches rtd, rtfd, html, doc, PDF(text), OpenDocument Format(text) documents and shows a preview their contents with keywords highlighted. I can't say enough good about this excellent little tool, but pardon the digression. You can find out more about SpotInside here:
http://www.oneriver.jp/SpotInside/index.html

I'll not pass final judgement yet, and I'm going to keep Google Desktop around for awhile to see if I grow to like it better than I do now. However, it won't surprise me a bit if in a month or so I decide to uninstall it. Google Desktop good, clever, and attractive-looking, but not great.

Google Desktop can index and search the full text of virtually all your files, including the following types:
• Gmail
• text files (.txt)
• PDF
• HTML
• email from Apple Mail and Microsoft Entourage
• iChat transcripts
• Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
• music and video files, including artist and song names
• Address Book contacts
• system preference panes
• file and folder names

New in version 1.0.1.216:

The new version, a one megabyte download, offers the following fixes and changes:

Feature Improvements
We've improved the following features:

• Speed of re-crawl (after restart) by about 20%
• Memory use when quickly indexing a lot of data by compressing it until we can process it
• Handling of UTF8 in Gmail
• Support for datefrom: and dateto: query restricts
• Display of search results when a document has been moved or renamed
• Performance when indexing has been turned off in preferences
• Detection of command-command key to reduce chances of activating it by accident
• Thumbnails for image files in the Web UI

Installation issues
• During initial indexing, Google Desktop may have a noticeable impact on your computer, especially if your hard drive is highly fragmented or low on disk space. We've designed Google Desktop to be usable (if a bit sluggish) during this period. Once indexing is complete, your computer should return to its normal, speedy self.

Mail and Browser Issues
• Indexing Gmail may take a long time because emails are downloaded in batches; each 'batch' is separated by two hours, and there's no progress meter.
• If you use MailTags, you need to delete the existing MailTags Spotlight importer from /Library/Spotlight or ~/Library/Spotlight and reinstall version 2.0b9 or later. Earlier versions cause crashes during indexing.

Privacy Settings
• If you have a file or folder that has been moved in and out of the privacy list, Google Desktop search will show only those revisions that were made when the file was outside of the privacy list.

Other Issues
• We have received reports of some CVS (Concurrent Versioning System) updates failing with i/o errors. The workaround is to disable indexing during update and re-enable after indexing is complete.

Bug fixes
We've fixed bugs where the following actions occurred:
• Duplicate and spam email messages were re-crawled.
• Spotlight Privacy settings on external volumes, FileVault, and ~/Library/Mail were not respected.
• Real-time events on external volumes were ignored.
• Certain large fonts (eg, Devangari) would cause alignment issues when displaying results.
• Quick Search box could be hidden behind the menu bar and where it would fade in after the helper window on first launch.
• Web history in Firefox and Camino would crash when the display was set to anything other than 32-bit color.
• "Alive/Update" ping was not always sent; Now it is sent per the Privacy Policy.

Additional Fixes
• Fixed several activation and IME bugs with the Google Desktop search box.
• Fixed scripting support of Google Desktop app.
• More robust loading of data from corrupt indexes which would result in rolling crashes in GoogleDesktopDaemon.

REQUIREMENTS
Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

System Support:
PPC/Intel

Free

For more information, visit:
http://desktop.google.com/mac


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Charles W. Moore

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