google desktop

well, before I started complaining about it, I wanted to try it. Because I don't have a windows computer, today was my first chance at getting into this. So far, it is a little better than I expected. I only have 66,000 files indexed, however that is plenty to start playing with. So far it seems a little faster, however it's display interface only shows the first XX results. Also, the complete hard drive is not indexed yet. Less data always goes faster.

What I expected to be the biggest drawback is the query interface. Spotlight started out with devlopers in mind. I can search for a file attribute better in spotlight. As best as I can tell, Google Desktop does not include media specific data (like length in time or pixels) It does, however offer a full API set.

One clear advantage: context. Spotlight will give you a list of files. If the file type is PDF, it will open the document, highlighting that portion of text. Google gives you partial text in the search results. This seems to be the MVP of this tool for mac users.

The other two advantages; indexing of gmail, and of websites are not so useful to me so long as long as it works with my email client. Web history, my browser does just fine.