Month: March 2005

I can’t write a full review here (I’m on a Mac…), but tonight Google takes the beta off its Google Destkop Search (this link is to my initial coverage, including a lot of ramblings on the implications).

Taking off beta is no big deal, right?

Well, no. It’s a pretty big deal, because Google is adding a couple of things in release 1.0 which 1/make a lot of sense, and 2/will stir up a pot o’ press reaction, all of which will have some variant of this headline: “Google Plans End Run Around Microsoft.”

In short, the new version of Google Desktop will include APIs for any Windows application developer, letting anyone plug their application into GDS (ie, iTunes, chat, or…MSFT Office, for example). Developers can access these APIs to do two things – one, to make sure their documents are indexed by GDS, and appear as searched by GDS in any way they care to. And second, to plug Google search, all of Google search, into their apps.

In short, if you are Windows developer, you can now plug Google (yup, all of Google search, not just desktop) into your application. Isn’t integrated search what MSFT is promising with Longhorn? Why, yes it is. But that’s two years out. This is ready now.

So is this Google starting an all out war for the hearts and mind of Windows developers, and for the search habits of Windows users? Hell yes to the latter, but on the former, not yet, but it’s sure as hell interesting. When I asked Nikhil Bahtla, GDS product manager, about this, he used Wordperfect as an example. Nice choice. I doubt MSFT will be busy working on a Word or Office plugin any time soon.

But wait, there is more. The new GDS will also create a floating “search box” independent of any browser, which you can place anywhere you want on top of Windows. Hmmmm. This sounds very, er, post browser, very…Web 2.0. See my musings on how web-based apps are starting to do to Windows what Windows did to DOS here….and man, this sure feels a lot like a paving stone down that particular road.

Given all this, I had to ask the Googlers I spoke to about the Microsoft issue, and they, as usual, ducked the question, saying they were merely providing features that Google’s users were asking for. Certainly that’s true. But certainly, it’s also true that this release will cause no shortage of consternation up in Redmond.

Once you have APIs and desktop software like this, you need to create a major push to support developers. Will Google be doing this, I asked? No comment, at least not at this point. But expect it. It will be, of course, what “Google’s customers will be asking for.”

In any case, read more about the news here (only a ZDnet story now, but by Monday morning…). This is certainly getting interesting. Release in extended entry.

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First, Google has integrated its broadly acclaimed Google Maps application, not a surprising move. Second, and more interestingly, Google has incoporated reviews. But unlike Yahoo, which allows for users to submit reviews at the point of search, Google crawls the web for reviews which are already extant, then rolls them into its results. Users cannot add their own reviews on the spot.

This is an important distinction, and yet another declaration of how Google differs from its competitors, in particular Yahoo. I’ve written about this here and here (and a lot of other places). Blogger aside (and there’s plenty to say about the limitations of that platform), Google has always been uncomfortable with user created content, at least on its main site. While sites like Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo are full bore participants in the architecture of participation (AOP), Google prefers to lay an algorithm between user created content and its own search service. It’s still AOP, but it’s AOP once removed.