So about a week ago, I installed the Google Desktop Search on my Windows laptop. It was more just to check it out, and see what it did – I didn’t really feel a large need to search files on the laptop itself (now, if I could search files on my mapped drives, that would be pretty useful).
But since trying it out, I think it’s a pretty nifty piece of software. Some of the features are not very useful to me – the mail searching doesn’t help, because it only searches Outlook and Outlook Express (my mail at work is Notes) and the browser history searching only searches IE right now, and not Firefox – although I use IE for intranet browsing, so I can search stuff from work-related sessions, which is useful.
Where it’s really shone for me is the ability to search AIM conversations. It’s always driven me nuts that I can log YIM chats, and can log in iChat…but the Windows version of AIM doesn’t seem to have the ability to archive chat sessions automatically.
Well, not anymore. The Google Desktop Search apparently intercepts all of the AIM chats I have on this machine, and puts them into its search cache. So for example, I can go to Google, switch to “Desktop”, and search for “Fram” – and find all the chats with people I’ve had about going to Frim Fram. Neat stuff.
If you run Windows, I recommend giving this tool a try. It’s pretty neat.
Anyone else have any thoughts?
yes, I read the brouhaha on /. a while ago about how you can theoretically search the files of other users on the same computer if you’re an admin, blah blah blah…well, nobody gets to use my computer but me, so I don’t much care.