Brief Hands-On Report--Google Desktop for Mac 1.0
We downloaded and installed a copy on our MacBook Pro--all went well. Google Desktop's preferences are set in a preference pane in System Preferences. There is a checkbox to enable searching Gmail and your Web history and to choose which volumes to search. You can also enable usage statistics being sent to Google to help improve Google Desktop in a future version. We don't have a Gmail account so we did not enable it, nor did we enable Web history searches or usage statistics at this time.
Following installation, Google Desktop began indexing the hard drive, using a substantial fraction (up to 60-70 percent) of the available CPU capacity. Indexing took several hours, probably since we have stored nearly 9 years of emails in an Apple Mail database.
By by pressing the command (or Apple) key twice in quick succession a black search box appears and the words that one wants to search on are simply typed into the field of the search box. As one begins to type, Google Desktop immediately begins displaying files that respond to the search words. As far as we can tell, the search is neither no faster nor no more complete than the job done by Apple's Spotlight.
We tried the names of several people with whom we correspond frequently and got exactly the same number of hits in about the same amount of time with both Google Desktop and Spotlight. The same with a number of word searches. But when we typed in "google desktop" we got 342 hits from Spotlight and 288 hits from Google Desktop. For "spotlight" we got 860 and 556 respectively.
Spotlight organizes its list the kinds of files located but Google Desktop just presents an ordered list. When a file on the list is clicked, both Spotlight and Google Desktop open the file in the appropriate application. The one nicety of Google Desktop is that a Google Web search can be conducted on the same topic with one click.
We will continue to try Google Desktop but at this time we don't see a sufficient advantage to using it over Spotlight. [Bill Fox]
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