Rael has a great write up:
The Google Desktop is your own private little Google server. It sits in the background, slogging through your files and folders, indexing your incoming and outgoing email messages, listening in on your instant messenger chats, and browsing the Web right along with you. Just about anything you see and summarily forget, the Google Desktop sees and memorizes for you.
And it operates in real time.
Great detail. Also, Danny rounds up a bunch of coverage here.
And many, many folks have emailed me reminding me that LOADS of other folks play both in desktop search, as well as the “Stuff I’ve Seen Before” arena. All true. Copernic, X1, Microsoft, Ask, the list is very long…
Also, check Scripting News for some interesting questions raised, though net net Dave seems to like it…
An open architecture desktop search app is a requirement. I must be able to write a plug-in that teaches it how to index formats it doesn’t understand.
Erik Speckman: “Google desktop search is a disappointment.”
Erik makes a good point. It only indexes Microsoft mail data. I would like it to index my object databases, that’s where all my content is. This could all be solved if they had a driver architecture that allowed us to teach it how to index file formats they don’t understand. Now that we’re on the desktop this becomes possible, as does a richer API. Google’s concern for server bandwidth goes away when the software is running on my desktop.
(thanks, Scott…)