The Iron Yuppie

Google Desktop Search Launches @ Searchblog

I've installed the Google desktop search and in truth, it's pretty good. It's not great and it's not horrible. But it's just pretty good (for the curious, you can install it here). I've played with a lot of other search tools, both public and not, and I can tell you there's a lot else out there that searches better, faster and so on. Plus there are plenty of design issues I'd like to see improved:

• Search as I type
• Unlimited listing of all items I search for
• Better and deeper previews of what I'm searching for
• Directly open the documents (rather than opening another browser window)
• Highlight search terms

X1 is probably the best I've used... it's just so much money! The thing that this actually highlighted for me was dual fold:

1. Google is going after MS hard core. We knew this was true, but this is the first salvo.
2. Google has made bad product (and non-customer centric) decisions in favor of increasing their revenue stream.

This latter point is the most dramatic. A company that was trying to simply solve the search problem with no assumptions about the right or wrong way to do it would have built a small app that integrated into the shell and opened a custom window on its own (much like X1). But Google did not do any of that:

• They hacked together a solution that uses a browser window instead of making it separate to reuse the engine they already have instead of one designed for the desktop;
• They only have one blank, with limited ability for the average person to figure out how to prune down the findings;
• They display a limited amount per screen to increase their ad revenue (yes I know that ads aren't there, but how long do you think that will last);
• They optimized for something users do not care about any more (400k app size) - actually, I don't know why they did this other than they're good engineers :)

I don't think this is the end of Google being cool; it's just kind of unfortunate that the realities of business are now affecting their behavior.

D