The River

The personal professional blog of Pamela Parker -- musings on marketing, advertising, media and technology.

Google Desktop Search Launched

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Looks like Puffin is finally making its debut. Danny reports that Google has debuted what it’s calling Google Desktop.

The program isn’t compatible with my system here at the office, for some reason. The installer says it conflicts with various programs on my system — most of which I don’t even recognize. Anyway, can’t really comment on it until I’ve had a chance to check it out.

UPDATE: Ok, so turns out the Desktop Search is incompatible with PortMagic, which is something that comes bundled with AOL 9.0 Optimized. I was able to uninstall it, but if Google is going for a mass (AOL-using) audience, this could become a problem .

My first reactions:

  • The user interface is a little… strange. Sure, Google wants it to be easy and familiar, but it’s weird to search your hard drive via a browser, and I would expect the mass audience to be a bit confused. If things (like my personal files) show up in a Web browser, it would be natural to assume it’s on the Web. Yes, I know it’s not, I’m just talking about perception.

  • Same goes for the Desktop search results showing up when you search Google Web.

  • What’s with not being able to search e-mail unless Outlook is open? One of the biggest promises of desktop search, at least where I’m concerned, is the ability to search archived e-mail files. I’ve got tons of e-mails archived that I’d love to get access to, but Outlook balks when trying to load gigabytes of old e-mail.

  • Kudos for functions to search IM and cached HTML files. But it strikes me as sort of weird to do the Web history this way. Aren’t temporary Internet files deleted occasionally, or shouldn’t they be? (Non-techie talking here.)

  • Why no ads? Too sensitive? I’d imagine they’ll be coming in not too long.

  • I’m with Calacanis in thinking it doesn’t do as much for me — yet — as X1, which I’ve been using for a while. X1 is a bit of a memory hog, but it also allows you to search and sort by a lot of different variables — from address, subject line, etc.

    UPDATE2: My buddy Tom has thoughts and links to others with thoughts.