Finally there's a desktop search product that's actually useful to me: Google Desktop.
I had tried the previous version of GDS a bit, as well as the company dog food (Yahoo Desktop Search or YDS). But both lacked the ability to search the most important asset on my computer: my e-mail archive.
Being one who does not use Outlook, that meant I was on my own until now. The latest GDS release has the ability to index Thunderbird mailboxes.
This is the killer feature for me. My computer just got twice as useful. It's funny how sometimes it just takes one feature to completely change your mind about a product, isn't it?
Thank you, Google.
And yes, before you ask, I have pointed out how useful this feature would be in YDS to anyone who'd listen. More than once. And no, I can't tell you if you should expect to see it or when that might be--so don't ask.
Any bets on how long it takes for someone to write a Thunderbird Extension that adds a GDS search box to the interface?
Hopefully I'll be able to stay awake long enough for the indexing to finish. I slept for about 3 hours on the 10 hour flight back from Tokyo and am now rather out of sync with the local time zone. There is much to catch up on, not the least of which is sleep.
Posted by jzawodn at March 07, 2005 02:58 PM
I still like the interface better on Y! search and Copernic... but for me, the killer aspects of GDS are two-fold:
- The open API.
Already, someone's written a plugin for Trillian, allowing me to search my IM transcripts quickly (Hmm... did I already tell Mia about the upcomign party? Did my colleague indeed promise to have his part of the project done yesterday...?)
- The indexing of my Web surfing.
I was skeptical about the usefulness of this at first... but boy, is it awesome! I already use and love Spurl.net for bookmarking, but I can't and don't bookmark everything. For the rest, GDS lets me quickly find not only the page I need, but glimpses into previously cached versions that I've looked at.
By the way, on a tangent, I wanted to express my appreciation for how you freely speak, er, write your mind here... and how you seem to also be open to multiple points of view, even when they aren't in agreement with your opinions or your employer's interests. It makes for continued interesting reading.
X11 Beta already supports Thunderbird:
http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/003342.html (since found after emailing you privately)
That's many months old and seems unrelated to YDS. :-(
Wow, that was bold!
It's interesting what will be the action from Y excutives on this post. Possible alternatives:
1. Jeremy is warned (he is too famous to be fired for that :))
2. Product manager responsible for YDS is warned
Personally, I use imapsync with Copernic, but that is too geeky and awkward.
Now, Jeremy, tell your YDS guys to keep up with Jones and release an YDS API. Somebody eventually will scratch the itch and write the plugin.
I'm very suprised at your stance on this project of Yahooos. I see you getting dirty looks from the devel team in coming days.
Infact, this blog entry is questionable. I don't even think Jerm would be this stupid to speak out about Yahoo. Remember what happened when a Google employee tried a similar stunt. I think a hacker has actually post this entry, and when Jeremy sees this entry, he'll remove it or something.
In all seriousness, Jerm wouldn't speak out against Yahoo, he knows better. I just hope whoever put this up, removes it swiftly.
Cheers,
Security advisor for Yahoo
COpernic's desktop search tool has offered Thunderbird email indexing since releasing their 1.5 beta a few weeks ago.
http://www.copernic.com/en/company/press/press-releases/press_70.html
Two comments:
- YDS is a memory hog.
- GDS is quick and responsive and always finds those lost emails.
Desktop search? I guess I am old and grey, but I find very little use for this. locate and grep and on the odd occasion grepmail does everything I need.
I found this stance suprising (G over Y), but i'm with Rasmus.
grep, locate, find..take your search drug of choice.
Nay. If you have a Windows machine and have word docs and powerpoints and visios for a few dozen customers stored on your local (or network) drive, you end up having so much data that a search tool becomes a productivity tool.
I prefer GDS for a different reason. GDS quietly sits in a corner. I dont have to launch another app with a heavy gui on my already whining windows box. I need my (desktop) space!
It's really rare to see employee from one company to boast about the direct competitor. It would cause very bad impact on outsiders, especially when two products are fighting head to head. still remember media made a big deal about yahoo employees using google search?
just dont understand why you do this, in any sense it's stupid.
Let's face it, Jeremy is sometimes frustrated with Yahoo! Everybody has got to be frustrated with their own employer every so often. And when one gets REALLY frustrated, they just go to their competitior...
Um, no.
You're reading more into this what what I actaully wrote. This has nothing to do with frustration and YDS and everything to do with GDS getting the one feature I thought it needed before.
How is that not clear? Did I use the wrong words somewhere?
Man, you guys must be new to this blog. He's done this a couple times in the past already, over various things. None of the well known bloggers are afraid of pointing out what they like.
I'm currently using Copernic because of their Thunderbird support. Maybe I should take another look at GDS now they've finally caught up. The plugin API could be useful if there's an easy way to find all the plugins that are created.
I used to use GDS, but Copernic is so far superior--in every single area I can think of--that it makes Google Desktop Search look like some amateurish hack. Seriously, running a local web server? What is this, a freeware hack job by your local script kiddie? Let's try REAL preview, intelligent sorting, search particular e-mail fields, etc. These are all functions basic to a desktop search tool--functions right there in Copernic and ones that will never be in GDS.
I switched away from GDS originally because it couldn't index arbitrary filetypes, and I'd really like a desktop search to index source code and text files.
Now with the new GDS (and Larry's any file plugin) I can search source code faster from the toolbar than I can fire up a Cygwin bash prompt and type up a grep command.
