Closer look at Desktop Search

Now that we know the basic of installing and running Google Desktop from the latest 2 previous blog posts I've made. I've decided to take a closer look at the Desktop Search. How can we control the Desktop Search.

We know that Desktop search makes an index over supported files. Some of the files are:

• Outlook, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird Emails.
• Word, Excel, Power Point documents.
• Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape web history.
• MSN, AOL, Google Talk Chat conversations.
• PDF documents.
• Music, Video and Image files.
• Archived ZIP files.
• Text files.
• Other files.
  

The search function don't only search on the file name, it also search within the files so you get a more relative search result. However you can find more Indexing plugins here that improves the Desktop search. If you open the options for Google Desktop you can choose what items will be indexed. Also you can set the indexing to index password-protected Office documents and Secure pages in the web history.

There is an setting to Encrypt the index and data files (May not be supported in other operative systems), by doing this the index and user data will be encrypted. What happens is that you enable Windows Encrypting File System for the folder that contains the index and data files. However there is a downside, by doing this the performance will decrease when displaying the search result as the index needs to be decrypted during each search. Note that the the encryption is only avaible on NTFS volumes. Also EFS needs to be enabled or if the volume is FAT the encryption setting will have no effect. The encryption will start to work right after the next time Google Desktop starts up.

Another setting is to Integrate the Desktop result in the web result. By default this setting is true. With another setting you can index and search emails within a Gmail account.

Google Desktop search provides search functionality on your local computer and the web but it also makes it available to search on other Computers. By turning on the setting "Search Across Computers" it'll index files from other computers who has enabled it. You can choose between what the other computers may index:

• My Documents and web history.
• My Documents only.
• Web history only.
• Nothing.

It requires a Google account to enable this setting. Because this feature, Search Across Computers transmits the text of your indexed files to Google Desktop servers for copying to your other computers. You might want to read the Privacy policy before enable this setting.
Note that the encryption is disabled and wont work at the same time by enable the setting for Search Across Computers.

Displaying a desktop search result.

One of the nice feature is the cached version of files. If you accidentally delete a file or change it you are now able to restore it to a previous state. Each time you open a file that's indexed Google Desktop will make copies and store them on your Hard drive.

One of the thing I love is how you can preview a file directly in your web browser instead of opening in an external program. That can be real time saving. And in a combination with the cached files if the case would be that I've lost or made any bad changes in a document I can just compare those twos.

The results is displayed sorted by the date of files but you may want to sort them for relevance.

How about performance changes when Desktop is indexing? As I mentioned before the indexing wont start before the computer is idle, and that is set to 30 seconds. There is at least to say noticeable performance changes when the the indexing has started, fortunately you wont notice it as you are not using your computer. But you may experience the computer a bit slow when going back.

One thing to remember with Google Desktop, that if you turn off Google Desktop or disable the content indexing it won't update files opened (to cache them) and new files that's added to the computer. There doesn't seem to be a way to only turn off the desktop search function (remaining the sidebar), the only way is to shut Google desktop down.

In the next post I'll have a look comparing Windows Vista desktop search with Google Desktop Search.

References:
Introducing Google Desktop
Getting Started with Google Desktop
The Encrypting File System