Google Planning Desktop Search for Mac Computers
Google announced plans to offer its Google Desktop Search to Mac computers on Friday, introducing Google technology to a loyal group of computer users who are not using the Windows operating system. Reuters reports that Google’s chief executive did not lay out a set schedule for the Mac ready desktop search, but did confirm that it would be on the way soon when asked. “We intend to do it,” Schmidt said at a University of California-Los Angeles conference celebrating the Internet’s 35th anniversary.
Rueters reports that Schmidt added that the Google Mac Desktop Search “had to be rebuilt from the ground up because of the fundamental differences between the Mac OS and Windows.” Google desktop search currently works with only computers running off of Windows and comes as a 450 KB download file and installs locally on the system. It places a system tray icon, which runs consecutively in the background indexing files on the system. The background-running crawlers monitor the files and internet/chat sessions and keep the index up-to-date by indexing the system when the system is not busy.
Google Desktop Search has turned some heads in the online privacy sector because of its ease of use and tracking on public computers, but has been raved by the searching community as a sound alternative to Windows search tools. Search Engine Journal’s Sushubh Mittal recently reviewed a week of using Google Desktop Search, here’s a snippet:
Knowing Google and its other services, I had little doubt that the new tool from their stable would be incredible. A week using it and I am not disappointed. It consumes manageable system RAM, gives me results in a format I am most used to watching (Google’s web results) and best thing of all it will only improve from here.
Agreed, the software support is limited. You can search through only the most popular file formats. PDF and many other formats are currently not supported. However, it is just the beginning. Google learns fast and we can be sure an update would cover-up most of the requisitions. But one thing is for sure, they need to start realizing that there are browsers in the market other than Internet Explorer and some people do use email clients which are not from Microsoft’ stable. They seem to have taken the popular approach in the first beta supporting what an average computer user would be using in day-to-day life.
