Oh sure, Google is the Search King right? And their new Google Desktop Search is awesome. If you use Windows. And Outlook. And Internet Explorer. And Word, and Excel, and PowerPoint. Who uses these things?
Ok, plenty of people use these things, but really, I thought Google was full of smart people. Their engineers are supposed to all be super-geniuses. Do they really use Outlook and PowerPoint on a daily basis? I know, they built this thing for the “average computer user” right? I suppose… but think about this, the hacker way says that you hack on things you care about, and you will be good at it, and put more into it, and scratch your own itch, and all of that. So while this Google Desktop Search thing was made by smart people for people who want to find things, I’m not sure I get it. Maybe I’m just a hacker snob of some sort…
I don’t really use Windows, or Outlook, or Internet Explorer, or Excel, Word, PowerPoint, etc… I do use Mozilla stuff, like Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc. So how awesome would it be to have something that could easily search my browser history, email messages, and calendar info? It would be nice… Mozilla Search anyone?
We could add in formats that have been opened (either by their owners or others) like PDF, Word files (plenty of apps read them), HTML, RSS, RDF, Atom, text, EXIF data in images, and on and on…
I think you could hack together your own Desktop Search using ht://Dig, or mnoGoSearch, or SWISH-E, or some crazy combination of all of those, but it’s not something I want to do, I’ve already got desktop search, via find, locate, egrep and a host of other tools strung together…