Anybody using Google Desktop search yet?

[gte204i]

I've been waiting on something like this to come out for a while now. The "snapshots" of my files it takes don't seem to slow my computer down (yet). It's also a handy backup when I am changing documents.

I don't even want to think about how much disk space this is costing me. I guess that's the next thing to check into.

[Leon]

I'm using it. Seems great!

[selvan777]

No but this article from PC World may be of interest to you.

[hausman]

"This is an amazing product," Smith says. "But it can also be a real privacy threat to unsophisticated computer users."

I agree. It's a wonderful search tool, so long as you understand its limitations and potential for abuse.

[gte204i]

...looks like most of the security risks are related to multi-user computers.

I don't have it set to cache web pages, and I am the only user of this computer.

I think I'll be OK as long as the program doesn't actually send my data to Google.

[Kenn]

Personally, I've found a lot missing from it.

- It misses files. I have two nearly html documents in the same directory on my hard drive. It finds one, doesn't find the other (I've let it index fully and I've never had it off/paused so I couldn't have made it "miss" anything). It also only has partial success searching similar filenames (search for "curve" yields bluecurve.jpg and greencurve.bmp but not bluecurve.bmp and greencurve.jpg, all in the same directory). Accessing, editing, copying/pasting these unfound files don't make them or the new copies show up.

- Partly due to this problem, I want it to reindex my drive. Don't know how to tell it to do so.

- I wish it provided a link to open the folder location where a file is found. I don't always want to view a document, sometimes I want to manipulate it.

- It doesn't find folders/directories.

-A simple security/password system to disable it would be helpful. Sure someone else using my computer could root through the files themselves or use a more inefficient search, but google makes it *too* easy and fast to dig up anything. On the same note, the "don't search these locations" field can be a bit of a giveaway if you're trying to restrict access to sensitive docs.

- I can't hide the systray icon (and yes I know about "hide inactive icons" - I just don't want to deal with the perpetual maintenance required with that). I want to save that space for things I actually need to be notified of.

Other than that, it's speedy and a great start, and hopefully they'll continue to work out the kinks and add new features as they always seem to do. However, until they do that it isn't very useful for me.

[jjackson02]

I'm using it. It's quite handy.

[jjackson02]