Give me the power to search

Over the last few days I’ve slowly been growing more and more found of Google Desktop. I was messing about with the work web site last week and generating sitemaps and trying the Beta version of Google’s sitemap features when I thought I might as well give the Desktop a crack.

The installation was fine and set up a breeze, the biggest down fall was the indexing of my computer. The indexing is where Google searches just about everything on your computer and creates indexes on all file types and contents of each. You can specifiy files to skip or not index. On my computer this took nearly 30mintues, which when that does sound a lot it is not bad as it only searches when you computer is idle; clever! Now I have a indexed hard drive and the searching is just great, of course Mac OSX users will just say Spotlight, and yes I aggree but this is really handy for me. Say at work I’ve been quoting Mr. X on a bag. When Mr. X phones up I just type in his name and Desktop finds everything to do with him, emails I’ve sent him, the Word documents of letters and even the pdf artwork of his carrier. By clicking the search bar all of the results are displayed in your browser of choice or you just search the web or google maps for more details.

In all I’m understanding more and more the reason for these power applications as after a while you do loose track of everything. The second great part is having the news and RSS feeds always displayed in the sidebar. Who’d have thought work could be so much fun now.