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Comment by jhoechtl | Hacker News Reader

We had that back like 10 years ago when google provided a tool (I forgot it's name, Google desktop search?) which scanned and indexed files locally. It was accessible through a shortcut, I laid mine to double-Ctrl and upon invocation it prompted a search bar

It was so great in search quality, number of formats it could index and performance that at one day I index the whole company file share. People showed up next to me and I rediscovered files which would have been lost otherwise.

This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an invocation to localhost to integrate local search results. As this was widely regarded as a terrible security feature to potentially tell google all about local files, reception of that feature was poor. This feature was the only incentive for google to provide the tool and therefore the tool got quickly axed.

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I assumed the reason the tool got axed was because in short order, Microsoft released its own desktop search, and then integrated it into Windows (Vista?); and Apple added Spotlight to OS X. In retrospect it’s a little surprising to me that in just a couple of years, the notion of indexing your entire hard drive went from novel to taken for granted.

I think desktop search existed before Google's. But not a lot of people used it in my experience. I found Google's to be fantastic,a and it was nice it showed results in line with the mostly used search engine. I was surprised when they discontinued it too, and suspect it was some "gentlemen's (anti-consumer) agreement" between companies around turf.

My theory was that google saw it as a way to seed their drive service or the strategy changed and the future was not desktop

I think Google Desktop even injected results into Google's main page via a "layered service provider" at the TCP level - back before we all used SSL for everything.

I used it to search my Thunderbird messages. It was much faster than Thunderbird's internal search. Luckily Mozilla improved its algorithm and its fast enough now.

> This tool also integrated after configuration with the browser which issued an invocation to localhost to integrate local search results.

They had a similar tool to make some sites load faster. I suspect they embedded some of that to Chrome at some point.

Edit:

It was Google Web Accelerator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Accelerator

I loved that app! I think my shortcut was Ctrl Space

Most of the time I knew exactly where the file was saved, but it provided an extremely quick way to open it without navigating folders

Its not desktop it indexes your org files on intranet sites. If you are signed in with you corp account to bing all searches also bring back relevant internal org info.

I remember that tool and loving it, as well as anyone else I talked to about it. Computer file search was (and still kinda is) a big pain.

Thanks to Search Everything I just dump all my files into Documents nowadays. I only care about a meaningful naming scheme.

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