Desktop search is one of my obsessions, especially given how much data I tend to generate. Google’s first effort at a desktop search tool left me nonplussed, but the recently released Google Desktop 2 makes quite a few strides in the right direction even if it continues to come up short.
The good news is that Google now includes the ability to index and search a number of additional file types out-of-the-box, including PDFs as well as MP3s and graphics files that have embedded metadata. In addition, it includes a plugin architecture so developers can add the ability for the program to index additional file types.
The program is elegant and simple to use, though it also lacks a lot of the power that the best Windows search product, DTSearch, features. On the other hand, it lacks the unwieldy interface that DTSearch uses to give users access to all that searching power. There’s definitely a tradeoff between the two products in useability vs. complexity of queries.
But the real drawback to Google Desktop 2 from my brief usage is that, like the initial Google Desktop Search product, it chokes on very large file sets which causes regular crashes.
Google Desktop 2 made fairly quick work of my 260,000 archive e-mails, crashing only 3-4 times while indexing them. But when its crawler turned to the My Documents folder on my primary data drive, it was a whole other story. So far, the program has crashed upwards of two dozen times and after almost a week only reached the 46 percent complete marker. Yes, that’s more than 250,000 files so far, but it is very annoying that it cannot index all 160gb worth of PDFs and HTML files without the constant crashing.
It certainly takes DTSearch a very long time to index that huge volume of files, but DTSearch has never crashed on me while indexing. Google Desktop 2 also insists on playing nice and only indexing during “idle time.” The only problem is it never says what triggers “idle time.” I’d prefer to be able to override that setting and have an “index now” button that would just run through the indexing without me having to wonder whether this or that action is going to throttle it back down (for example, even a low-impact task like editing a text file seems to cause Google Desktop 2 to idle).
Probably for most people, the fact that Google Desktop 2 does much of what a product like DTSearch does and at zero cost will render it an ideal desktop search tool. Me, I’m torn between Google Desktop 2 and its elegant interface but crashing problems, vs. DTSearch and its rock-solid performance but uglier-than-sin interface.