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1970-01-01

Wasn't this done (20!) years ago? It seems very familiar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop#Results_list:_t...

Google Desktop was mainly for local file search. Shame that the idea never really took off, and even today local search is hopelessly broken on both Windows and Mac.

It did take off. There were server pizza boxes and everything. It was killed in 2011 by the very same company that is now introducing it as a "new app" in 2025.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/283722910233

https://web.archive.org/web/20060112110931/https://desktop.g...

The dead Internet theory continues to prevail. What is old is new again because nothing new can be created. The Hollywood reboots formula works, so we continue it with technology reboots.

Those boxes were for enterprises, not for you to plug into your laptop.

Right. The box wasn't necessary to search, but was an indicator of Google Desktop's success. Furthermore, we can still leverage the dead binary with just a little system hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ieNv7oelk

What's the relationship between the search appliance and Google Desktop? I'm not seeing any connection.

I’m not the OP but I see the connection as Google seeking growth and revenue by applying their general search know-how to areas outside of the Internet.

I followed search appliance closely when they announced it. It was interesting technically and looked cool, but seemed like a dead end similar to desktop as applications were largely moving off of racks/desktops. I was right about that, but I expected Google to offer a web-based search appliance and they never did beyond custom searches. Algolia fills that opportunity nicely now.

I'm guessing, I think the box was marketed as a networked version of the app, and GP might be drawing a bit hand-wavy connection between the two.

There was an Enterprise version of the Desktop app that connected to the Google Search Appliance (yellow pizzabox) or Google Mini (blue pizzabox, not Google Home Mini) as well as searching Windows/Mac local/shared drives https://web.archive.org/web/20070302151851/https://desktop.g...

Could you clarify how this relates to the dead internet theory?

For Windows, Powertoys Run is great, but nothing beats Voidtools Everything for file search. It's an amazing piece of software that has retained the number one spot on Google search for the single term "everything" for an amazingly long time.

I paid for AgentRansack / FileLocator Pro ten years ago and I still really like it. Will have to try Voidtools to compare.

If memory serves me right, it could look for information in Word documents and instant messaging apps extremely quickly and then display results in a great UI similar to google.com. Nothing before or after ever matched its capability. A real shame the product was killed. I guess there was no money to be made there.

Fool me once, ...

It was a time when federated and unified views were considered the optimal user experience and there were many flavors of the concept at the time (msft had search providers that would let you service any kind of result in windows or sharepoint search). However, 'brand awareness' started to take over. Nobody wanted to be just a provide to an obviously google-ish experience because it makes them easier to replace.

Like with messaging apps, everything fractioned to fall to a zero sum game of exclusive 'experiences'.

>local search is hopelessly broken on both Windows and Mac.

Not to derail this Windows thread, but is there anything that works remotely well on Mac? The built-in options are ... lacking

I find the file search annoying on Mac because it doesn't search the drive I'm in on finder (skill issue? Please tell me if that's configurable)

I find cmd+space to be 10000000x better than windows for applications though

Finder -> Settings (or Cmd-,) -> Advanced -> Default Search Scope

What's wrong with Finder and search scope set to "This Mac"?

The problem is the search ranking. It often ranks file names with partial matches higher than file names with full exact matches, and this frustrates me endlessly. For example I have a folder called "Home" containing documents like receipts for home improvement projects, manuals for appliances, mortgage statements from banks, etc. Searching for "Home" preferentially brings up random other files that has "home" in their names but this folder is ranked low. I have not found any way to adjust Spotlight's ranking heuristic.

Yeah, I have similar problems all the time and its heuristic is really strange. Like, it’ll emphasize a file called ._home_env_vars.sh buried in an old Python environment that hasn’t been accessed in 8 years over one just called “home” that I search for and open three times a week.

The other big thing that’s frustrating is it’s never clear to me when it’s done searching and when it still has more results to find.

I used Agent Ransack for search on Windows, though I'm not on Windows any longer.

No way. Google's, "Don't catalog or organize anything, just throw it into a bucket and our Search™ will find it for you," ethos has been catastrophic for the web. I don't want it anywhere my personal files (any more than it already is through Drive et al.). Bad search is bad, but if you expect it, you can plan for it. If you're convinced that search is all you need, and then search fails, you're screwed.

even today local search is hopelessly broken

I use FileLocator Pro on Windows, and a fairly organized hierarchical structure for all my files (that lives outside of the My Documents crap).

It doesn't need indexing - it makes use of very performant MFT querying to speed things up (and can of course search contents as well). Not quite instant unfortunately, but on modern hardware it's not too bad. I tried Everything and other index-based technologies but was never quite satisfied. I do really miss LookOut for email, that's one of the best search experiences I ever knew.

Yes, I had the first version and loved it. Back then searching for local files took forever. I was upset when it was discontinued. Even today on a high spec Windows 11 Pro machine search isn't as good as what it was with Google Desktop back then.

Try everything from voidtools, it's incredibly fast (both search and indexing).

Totally agree it's awesome! It's a great example of performance as a feature.

This was done to make Google the default search engine of your browser most likely Internet Explorer. They then pushed Firefox and then created Chrome. Now they have to be sure that your default search engine is Google.

No, 2005 was peak 'Don't be Evil'. It really was a different time. They made Desktop simply because it fixed search. Being in the default browser was a nice side effect.

Potentially it was a different time. Google did hire Eric Schmidt whose previous company Novell was destroyed by Microsoft. Some say that NT stood for Novell or NetWare terminator.

You might be confusing this with Google Toolbar. It didn't change your search engine, because searching in the URL bar didn't even exist yet. Search engine competition wasn't really a zero-sum game back then, because users would often install multiple toolbars for different purposes (or more likely, have them installed automatically by crapware). But nevertheless it did cement Google's market dominance.

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