Afew months ago, when the buzz was all about the “new and improved” search engine Microsoft was introducing, I found it lacking. While many pundits were gushing over this challenge to Google, I found it to be merely a pale imitation – one that trailed in the all-important area of results.
Now Google has released a desktop search application for Windows that some tout as the beginning of the end for Redmond’s evil empire. It is a good search engine, but that’s to be expected. But as an “application” it’s merely a pale imitation of those coming out of Microsoft, trailing badly in user friendliness and scope.
You’ll see this problem as soon as you try to install the product. A message box popped up telling me I couldn’t install because there wasn’t a gigabyte of free space on my C: drive. The fact that two other drives had more than 100 gig available seemed beyond the scope of the installation program. It’s been years since an application didn’t offer me the opportunity to install it wherever I wanted to. And this application doesn’t belong on your C: drive. Because you probably already have registry files and swap files there, anything that could fill the volume should be relegated to another partition before disaster happens. Google’s indexes will start big and grow bigger with every document you read.
The application saves its own copy of everything indexed – Word documents, e-mails, and even instant messages. That’s the second problem. This will index everything you view including spam, Web pages you land on accidentally, every IM – all the ephemera of our daily existence. But not Adobe Acrobat files. PDFs are beyond the range of this desktop engine. Without the ability to index all text files and interactively keep and remove files from the index, this app is a no-brainer but it’s the brain that designed it that I’m talking about.
Tip of the week
Tomorrow is Election Day. Learn the issues, study the candidates then make an informed decision.
