Google Desktop arrives for Mac

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 05 April 2007 03:44

Business IT - Technology

Google Desktop searches messages stored in a Gmail account and your web history. The program indexes web pages as you visit them, making it easier to return to that piece of information that you saw recently but can't remember where. Pages using https can be excluded from indexing.

Documents are cached when you view them, providing the possibility that Google Desktop will be able to retrieve an earlier revision of a file, or one that you've deleted. The initial beta does not provide any controls over the size of this cache.

Google Desktop also integrates with Google.com. The last item on a Desktop results list is "Search web for", which triggers a normal Google search, and when you view the full results list in a browser the familiar links to image, news and other Google searches are present at the top of the page.

Other features of Google Desktop for Windows - notably gadgets - are promised for later versions of the Mac version.

Google Desktop installation is not an especially Mac-like process. The download link from Google's web site actually downloads an application called Google Updater (1M), which in turn downloads and installs Google Desktop (2.8M) and optionally other software.

As the name implies, Google Updater can also update Google software already installed on the computer.

Like any search program that indexes files, it takes Google Desktop some time to create the initial index, so don't be surprised if it doesn't immediately find documents you know are somewhere on your hard disk.