Review: Google Desktop for Mac

Macintosh users are not used to having choices for the things that Apple provides with the operating system. Since we get iTunes, we don’t go looking for other music management software. Since we have iPhoto, we rarely search for a photo management solution. And what happened to Konfabulator once we got Dashboard? The point is, like IE and Notepad in Windows, these are applications that are good enough, which means most users do not actively look for replacements.

Spotlight is an exception. We have always had the superior and eminently hackable Quicksilver at our disposal, and now we get Google Desktop for Mac.

The Desktop application has already gone through multiple versions on Windows and has grown to be a powerful, and maybe a little overbearing, product. Keeping that in mind, it is refreshing to see that the Mac version is simpler and more focused. Where the Windows version has Widget-like Gadgets, Sidebars, and a potentially busy interface, the Mac version just does search. Of course, the pressing question is—what makes it better than Spotlight or, for folks like me, Quicksilver?

NOTE: The following is a review of Beta software. This means Google does not believe it is ready for widespread public consumption. Beware, brave traveler, here there be dragons!

The first time you install Google Desktop, it starts indexing your computer (and your GMail if you ask it to). This may take many hours as it meticulously builds an index of all the files on your computer. It uses Spotlight’s preferences to decide which folders to avoid for indexing, which is a nice touch. It also uses Spotlight importer plugins to allow new file types to be indexed.

By default, the Google Desktop search window can be launched by hitting the command key twice in quick succession. Thankfully, this doesn’t step on the Spotlight (cmd-space) or Quicksilver (ctrl-space) defaults. This brings up the black search window:

Just like Spotlight, it starts searching as soon as you enter a character in the search window and starts displaying results below. An icon next to the filename represents the type of file—email, music, photograph, PDF, or whatever it may be. The Google desktop can perform a full-text search of your GMail, local email, PDFs, .txt files, Office docs, iChat transcripts, Address Book, and a few others.

Another “feature” of Google Desktop is that it closely ties in to the Google.com web interface. What this means is that you get an additional “Desktop” tab at the top of your trusty Google logo which will lead you to a page where you can search your desktop from the web interface. This seems a bit scary at first—if I can search my own desktop from Google.com that means it isn’t quite secure or private, you may think. This is not the case: the web search for your desktop is served locally so your desktop search results are handled entirely on your computer even though they may look seamlessly integrated into your Google search results. If you click on the Desktop link, it will take you to an “http://127.0.0.1/” address, which is the address of your own computer.

It also searches through your web history, which is nice but can be overwhelming if you use the web a lot. Any random search can return a lot of web matches if you spend a lot of time online, so you may want to turn this off.

The software also creates copies of your files in its cache whenever you view it. This exposes a nifty feature that allows you to look at the cached copy, even after you may have accidentally deleted the original file. This makes it serve as an unintentional but potentially useful backup—though not one you want to rely on.

Google Desktop is configured through a Preference Pane in System Preferences. It provides the obvious options: turn off indexing, # of results to display, which disks to index, and so forth. It also allows you to turn off the Google web integration.

Overall, I believe it is a solid replacement for Spotlight but not for Quicksilver. It seems to have a better knack than Spotlight for deciding which search results belong at the top of the list (documents, not random source files). Google Desktop also seemed to be a lot faster at getting results from places such as inside email bodies and web history. Quicksilver, however, builds in so many actions beyond search that it is an indispensable part of my computing. It will take a lot for either Spotlight or Google Desktop to take its place.

Of course, all of this will change once Leopard arrives on the scene with an expected Spotlight upgrade. Google Desktop needs to be significantly better than Spotlight to be a real challenge, and as things stand right now there isn’t sufficient reason to switch. On the other hand, this is the first public beta release, and the application should get better as time goes on.

NOTE 2: Google keeps most of their software in beta status for much longer than most companies, sometimes seemingly forever. This means that people do not take their “beta” tags as seriously, but keep in mind this is the first beta for this product.