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Wednesday, November 21, 2007

First Impressions of Google Desktop

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CC is listening to: Little Dream--Jim Chappell (Tender Ritual)

Ever heard of Google Desktop? Me neither. Until yesterday, that is.

I came across it searching for something else. I was actually searching for a Google gadget that would allow me to keep a to-do list that's always visible on my desktop.

"Google Desktop makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web." I wasn't entirely sure what that meant until I decided to take a chance and install it to see how it worked. After you install it, you'll see a little Google search box on your desktop (don't worry, you have the option to auto-hide it if you're a desktop neat freak like me :-)).


Now get a load of this. Say I'm looking for a document that's on my hard drive somewhere. I forgot where I saved it, but I DO know that it's got the word "record" in the document.

I type "record" in the Google Desktop search box...


And as I'm typing the word it gives me everything in my hard drive that has the word "record" in it. This includes programs, pictures, documents, e-mails, your browser history, you name it. If you've ever tried to hunt down an email that someone sent you over 6 months ago, you can appreciate how helpful this is going to be :-).

Now granted, Windows can search for stuff too, but Google Desktop does it SO much faster and so much more efficiently.

And here's another thing. Notice the "See all 1134 desktop results in a browser" link at the bottom of the list? Click on that...


And you'll see all the search results in Google result format. It found 790 emails, 438 files, 7 web history files, and 4 "other" files (which turned out to be Outlook invitations) that had the word "record" in my hard drive.

That's pretty freaking cool :-).

There's also a "10 Great Uses for Google Desktop" article here. If you need more information about Google Desktop, click here.

Oh, and by the way: I *was* able to get a to-do list application--it's one of the gadgets that you can get when you install Google Desktop. The beauty of it is that it links to my Outlook task list. I also added a few more gadgets: my Google calendar, a scratch pad, a calculator gadget, and a music player. I love that I can play music from my hard drive now without relying on Windows Media Player--it's always bugged me the way Media Player takes up space on my taskbar :-).

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