10/26/2004
Now there is a statement from Google CEO Eric Schmidt that Google will not go into a browser war against Microsoft. So Schmidt seconds what John Doerr said a few weeks ago. Schmidt goes on to explain that Google won’t move towards being a broader internet portal, avoiding to go into direct competition with Microsoft and Yahoo on that stage. Actually releasing the desktop search was a strong move into Microsofts territory allready, and they pushed into Yahoo’s earlier that year by launching Gmail. So I guess they try to avoid confronting these any more right now. The web search is still their home playground though, where Microsoft and Yahoo do have a lot to catch up.
10/15/2004
So the Google desktop search tool finally indexed all of my hard disk, and I’m rather impressed with the speed and the great integration into the regular web search. Alas, some of the features are of no use for me: I read my mails with Thunderbird, and happen to browse the web with Firefox. My IM happens on ICQ, and if I will ever move away from that, I might switch to Jabber, not AIM. So the only thing that’s left for me of all the features is the regular file search. And even there, I am slightly disappointed that it’s not even able to index pdf documents. Looks like the developers were very focused on Microsoft apps here.
Will future versions of the desktop search offer support for other mail clients, web browsers or even non MS Office documents? What if Google offered an API for the tool, which allowed developers to publish their own extensions? How long would it take for the Mozilla community to build a plugin to search the Mozilla/Firefox cache, or Thunderbird mails? With the toolbar, Google never offered an official version that worked with anything else than Internet Explorer, although there surely was quite some demand among webmasters. Will they change this approach with the toolbar, or will they continue to push Microsoft’s products?
10/14/2004
While Google board member and investor John Doerr recently said the Google Browser was not going to happen, the search giant surprised the net once again today by releasing the beta version of the Google Desktop Search. This handy tool keeps an index of local files that can then be searched via the normal Google front end in the web browser. As soon as it is installed, Google offers another tab, called ‘Desktop’, which will display results from local files. Also, these results will be integrated with regular web search results. With this application Google has proved how well they can integrate a local search with their existing services. This is very well done, and an aggressive push into Microsofts territory - the users desktop.
An extensive review can be found here