LincolnBlogs

Just the other day, Google released their Google Desktop for Linux (Beta). I picked it right up and installed it. I have been using it for a couple days now and I have to say it’s pretty cool so far!

Google Desktop is basically a desktop search engine. It searches through your files and you can define where and what it searches. Now I was a little hesitant about installing this because I thought for sure I’d take a performance hit either by just havintg another app running in the background or at least while it was indexing (searching through my files). I didn’t notice either, however, the machine I am running it on is a 2ghz laptop with 2gb of ram 😉 I have heard of others who have noticed a little performance hit. I don’t know what kind of systems they were running though. Ymmv.

I wasn’t sure I was even going to use this application, but since I like Google’s other offerings, I wanted to give this one a fair shake. In my new job, I have started accumulating a bit of documentation. Much of that documentation is notes that I made, some of it is actual Word/OpenOffice docs, and some of it is saved IM logs. I also have a decent sized php code repository. There have been several times in the last couple days where I needed some information out of that documentation and *that* is where this utility has come in handy. A couple quick taps on the control key and a little search box shows up. You type in your phrase or word and another box opens up below it with the search results. You also have the option to open up a webpage with the results and not only return local file results, but web results too. It’s actually pretty nifty.

It’s hard for me to contrast this with any other desktop search function because I haven’t really tried anything else. I know there is one available called Beagle, and where there is one thing in Linux, there is probably more as well. All I can say is that I have found this utility to be non-obtrusive and useful for the past couple days on my system. If you are looking for a search utility like this, you might just want to give this one a try. And don’t forget about Google’s other offerings as well – their word processor, calendar, spreadsheet, and, of course, webmail.