Now I love Google Desktop at work. I use it daily trying to find one customer’s file or another. Now I love its search, I’m not totally huge on its sidebar because it makes my work machine slowly stagger to a stop at work. But at home I also use the Google Desktop and have it linked for all computers at home so I can find any file easily and I even use the sidbar at home to keep on top of some things… at least I did when I was running XP. Now running Ubuntu I’ve found little need for the sidebar. As I can have one if I want, but I really don’t have a need for one. At the same time, well…
Below Google announced that they released Google Desktop for linux, which is all well and good but its even more basic then when they released the beta for the Mac. It only has Search.
For most Linux users, looking for files, documents, or emails usually involves some combination of ‘find’ and ‘locate,’ but sometimes these tools don’t quite do what you’re looking for, like finding that single PDF containing the specific topic you’re looking for. Or you just wish there was a much easier way to find something than ‘find /home/username -name ‘*.pdf’ and ‘pdftotext pdf_file_name.pdf output.txt…’
So that’s why today we’re releasing Google Desktop for Linux. Developed primarily out of our Beijing office, it includes almost all the features from the first Windows version of Google Desktop Search plus the Quick Search Box, so you can quickly search through all your files, emails, web history, and more. Just hit ‘Ctrl’ twice to bring up the Quick Search Box and start finding your stuff!
Ok… that’s all well and good, but I would love for it to be able to search my Pigin (IM) and Konversation (IRC) Logs plusI know that more and more “normal” users are using Ubuntu and it would be nice to have the “friendly” sidebar available for them. They hadn’t even attempted it.
One thing that I will also pass on was something I read mentioned in a review of the Google Search. Ubuntu has available a linux compatible search tool called Beagle that the writer loved. It doesn’t do a few things that Google Search did… but more importantly, it didn’t slow down the system as much as Google Search did.
Tags: Applications, Google, Interesting, Review, Search
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