Google Desktop for Mac: Why now?

One of the key benefits of using Google Desktop rather than the search functionality that ships with Microsoft Windows XP is its speed and online functionality. Vista has improved the built-in search, but for XP users, Google Desktop is a powerful search tool that does a much better job at helping you find things, even if they're online. This morning, Google released a version of its Desktop search client for the Mac operating system. Sure enough, the release has a lot of people asking why? After all, Macs have been shipping with Spotlight, OS X's built-in system-wide search since early 2005. What could possibly make this worth installing when a search function is already installed at an operating system level? We decided to give it a go with a Mac laptop lying around at CNET Labs, to see if it's worth using.

Search is managed with a widget that displays results.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Google Desktop installs quickly and will index everything on your computer's hard drive in a few hours depending on how many files you have. Also included in the indexing process is your entire Gmail account. Not included is data from other Google services such as Groups, Calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets. The app is managed entirely in system preferences, where you can set which drives it should index, as well as files or folders you don't want it to look through.

To search for something, hit the apple key twice in brief succession. This will pull up a widget that you can type your search query into. Results come up as you type, and pop up at about the same speed as on Spotlight. It's also worth noting that if you don't have Google Desktop running, the keyboard shortcut won't do anything.

One thing that Google still insists on doing is using a Web browser to display full results; only a few will pull up a few in the search box. If you don't already have your browser open, Google Desktop will launch it, which is kind of a pain. If you're looking for e-mails or Web pages, this can be handy, but for local system files it just slows down the process. Spotlight is much easier to work with, pulling up a detailed results box as part of the application.

Google Desktop for Mac is a solid download, despite the fact it requires users to be running OS X 10.4 (which has Spotlight search built-in). Mac users who don't have 10.4 yet have likely been using tools such as Quicksilver and Launchbar to find and launch applications, files, and media. The Gmail integration is neat, but we would have liked to see them add integration with the rest of its office suite to make it a compelling alternative to Spotlight.

Google Desktop's indexing options. You can configure Gmail integration here as well.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Basic program setting menu. Here you can configure things such as keyboard shortcuts and the quick search box.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Taskbar integration. Unfortunately there's no way to do a search right from the taskbar, unlike Spotlight.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The results page. Here you can see complete results from a search, split up by file type.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

[niallcook]

Privacy issues?

It's not a bad app, but I'm a bit concerned that "StatsUploader" is trying to connect to ik-in-f104.google.com even though I've turned off the option to share my usage data with Google...

[Josh.Lowensohn]

That's very interesting...

I didn't even think to check the terminal to see what this thing was doing in the background.

I turned off the usage statistics on my install...did you turn off the setting later? It could just be connecting to your Gmail account (unless you didn't have that set up?)

If I may ask, why did you choose to try it instead of Spotlight?

[bousozoku]

Takes too long and too much storage

I really wanted to try this because I'd seen some preliminary looks at the software.

I started the downloader and it installed the software and started the indexing process. On my 60 GB drive with about 11.5 GB free, it was taking hours to complete and my estimate was that it would take over 4 GB of space for the indexes (indices), which was far from a little space. I ended up running the de-installer, which asked if I wanted to remove the indexes and also took the Google Updater application as well.

Perhaps, in the future it will be more useful but for something that duplicates Spotlight's functionality with a different flavour, it's not worth it right now.

[ramsdlo2000]

Forget Google Desktop and give us Picasa

I can't remember asking Google to give me another way to search my desktop,
but I have asked several times for Picasa.