10/15/2004

Does Google’s Desktop Search need an API?

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?