News

Google Desktop Now for Macs

By the Betanews Staff | Published April 4, 2007, 12:04 PM

Google Desktop 1.0 is now available for Macs, the search giant announced Wednesday. The software is more basic than its Windows counterpart, focusing strictly on searching for files, e-mails and Web pages. A "Quick Search Box" resides on the desktop and displays results to queries in a dropdown menu.

Like Spotlight, which is built into Mac OS X, Google Desktop indexes the entire computer in the background. It can also pull up Gmail and Web history, in addition to integrating with Google's Web search by adding a "Desktop" link. Unlike Google Desktop for Windows, the Mac version does not currently include the Google Sidebar or e-mail client integration.

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prndll
Apr 4, 2007 - 8:20 PM

Why exactly would I need software like this at all? If you don't know what is on your pc, then you have bigger problems.

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dhjdhj
Apr 5, 2007 - 8:10 AM

Desktop search tools are incredibly useful - I have about 600,000 files on my machine, many of which contain source code or documents (including many books in PDF format).
Now, consider, suppose you want to find a document that contains a particular phrase (e.g, "mysql select clause"). Are you trying to tell me that you could instantly know without searching exactly which documents (and don't miss any) on your machine contain that phrase?

I doubt it.

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cap737
Apr 5, 2007 - 4:15 PM

I can see your point of using the google plug-ins to search different file types for the work that you do. But to an average mac user using text docs, music files, photos and such there would be no point of replacing spotlight.

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dhjdhj
Apr 4, 2007 - 5:14 PM

So why exactly would I want to use this instead of Spotlight, which already picks up everything on my Mac?

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ogman
Apr 4, 2007 - 10:45 PM

Agreed, Spotlight is better and faster.

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twosheds
Apr 5, 2007 - 2:27 AM

An Ars Technica review said it was notably faster than Spotlight.

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ogman
Apr 5, 2007 - 8:00 AM

Uh-huh. And MacWorld once said Windows sux.

Both gospel, eh?

I tried it...Spotlight's faster.

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