Fluffy Bunny

I just spent a few hours playing with Google Desktop (the product formerly known as Fluffy Bunny), and it is a beautiful thing. There was instant gratification using the tool a minute after I installed it, and as it indexes more, it becomes more useful. How did I ever live without it? Can I even call that living?

This is the Fisher Windows users have been waiting for, as I asked in March:

Google has shown me I can have it all: fast, ranked search with a simple UI and a rich query language. Is it too much to ask for being able to have that kind of search for my personal data the way I can already search the public web?

Apparently, it's not too much; Google has once again put a smile on my face and instantly made me more a productive version of myself. They have raised the bar, with a very difficult act to follow for Microsoft, Ask, X1, and all the desktop search tools Michael Wexler mentions; my only wish is that my Linux and Mac machines could have Fluffy Bunnies, too!

Rael Dornfest describes it well:

The Google Desktop is your own private little Google server. It sits in the background, slogging through your files and folders, indexing your incoming and outgoing email messages, listening in on your instant messenger chats, and browsing the Web right along with you... In evaluating the Google Desktop as an interface to finding needles in my personal haystack, one thing sticks in my mind: I stumbled across an old email message I was sure I'd lost.

Danny Sullivan has a great metaphor: "Google Desktop Search makes it easy to painlessly preserve your own archive of what you've seen and for free. It becomes, as Gary Price wished for last week, a TiVO for the web."

There's a wonderful chock-full-of-bits analysis and interview by John Battelle (and more), including a wishlist that got me very enthused:

This provides Google a major new platform to build upon -- a client application that integrates with the web. Can I imagine upgrades to that app that include spiffy new features like -- oh -- a lightweight word processor so you can take notes on your searching, or a calendar? Better yet, can I imagine Google opens this platform up to third party developers, to do what they do best? Yes, I sure can.

I would love to develop on this platform. Google Superwoman Marissa Mayer revealed several nice tidbits in John Battelle's interview, including:

The technical details of this product are stunning. It only uses of 8 megs of RAM to run. It's a 400 Kbyte file!

...The distinction between the hard drive and the net is becoming blurred. We want this application to be a sort of photographic memory for your screen...

The default rank is by date. (When we tested, we learned that) people understood the context of "when they did see this"? The results list the last time you accessed any particular document. However you can also sort by relevance. The desktop relevance scheme lacks Pagerank (of course), but it does incorporate the other 150 factors (Google uses on the web) - factors like are the (keywords) together, in bold, related, things like that.

Now please excuse me while I go play with the tool some more. Fluffy Bunny Fisher, I salute you. Marissa Mayer, I salute you. Steve Lawrence, I salute you. I need to buy a gun so I can do a 21-gun salute... time to do a web search. Hmmm. Apparently searching for a warm gun doesn't actually find me a gun, but it sure does find a lot of happiness...

Comments

[ritilan]

Every time I read your site, I am blown away by
how info-dense your posts are. It is good to have
you back actively posting.

[Adam]

Thanks! Every time I see your name, I think of the Foo Fighters' "This is a Call" which said, "Ritilan is good". ;)

[Adam]

From The Now Economy's blogpost, Fluffy Bunny is a WinSock-puppet:

...we found that Google Desktop Server actually hooks into Windows' TCP/IP stack to directly modify incoming traffic from Google's websites to splice its local results in. Once you install GDS, there's a bit of Google's code running inside every Windows application that talks to the Internet.

It's done using a long-established hook in WinSock2, its Layered Transport Service Provider Interface (SPI)...

More notes: Fluffy Bunny Burrows into WinSock...

[Henrik]

I like Google Desktop a lot myself, although I am slightly hampered by running Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird instead of the Microsoft alternatives. However, they have said they will do something about that and add more file formats over time. But the idea is so right!

[Adam]

First Microsoft bought Lookout, and now Yahoo! is buying Stata Labs. Analyses:

• John Battelle
• Jeremy Zawodny
• Ross Mayfield

Nice.

I use my Google Desktop everyday at work, usually about a dozen times a day, and I've found it to be very helpful. I still haven't installed it on my home machine (which I still need to bring together all the files I want indexed -- it'll be a multihour project and I don't want to start it till I know I have time to finish) nor on my laptop (not enough room on my hard drive left to create the index).

[Adam]

Microsoft Desktop Search Revealed:

Tom Warren has the world-exclusive first public look at the MSN Toolbar Suite. The suite consists of two products, the MSN Toolbar/Deskbar, and MSN Desktop Search.

The MSN Toolbar/Deskbar is a series of toolbars: One for Outlook, one for Internet Explorer / Windows Explorer, plus the MSN Deskbar. The toolbars reside in their respective programs, while the Deskbar goes in the taskbar, much like the Windows Media Player Toolbar, and all of them allow you to search, either based on whatever program you're in, or globally. It integrates fully with Windows, and with Desktop Search.

MSN Desktop Search is much like Google Desktop Search. It indexes your hard drive in real time, and delivers results very speedily. Unlike Google's product, Tom says MSN Desktop Search allows you to search for the author of a file which may mean it searches metadata like Apple's Spotlight, which in turn may mean it can search for other metadata items, and Windows does allow for a lot of metadata.

Google Desktop Search landed with a splash, but interest seems to have fizzled, as many realized how limited it is. Speed isn't everything, and like MSN Search to Google Search, MSN Desktop is likely to be comparable in that area. Even one or two extra features is going to give Microsoft a significant edge. Google might want to think about upgrading its product's capabilities, and fast. MSN's is coming next month.
(via Slashdot and Search Engine Watch)

[Adam]

Jon Udell on Firefox History in Google Desktop Search:

I dusted off an earlier proxy project and turned it into a local proxy that writes the web pages I view in Firefox out to the filesystem. Once they're exported with .html extensions, Google indexes them.

My solution is a just a quick hack. It would need some refinement to be generally useful...

Everybody seems to have a different reason to care about Google's desktop search tool. For me, it's finding things I've seen on web pages. That's huge. My proxy project was aiming to do something more ambitious -- convert pages to XHTML (where possible) and enable structured search within them. But plain old fulltext search that encompasses the pages I've read -- whether I got there by way of Google, or A9, or a referral from a web page or email or word-of-mouth -- is a killer app for me.

By the way, this same approach works for any datatype that can be exported as text to the filesystem.

...

Update. Claus Dahl pointed me to a better solution. Ken Schutte's Slogger is a Firefox extension that saves your viewed pages -- and comes with a toolbar button so you can turn the faucet on or off at will. Nice! Of course you can use any indexer on the output, not just Google's.

Update 2: Jacques Surveyer has an excellent summary of alternatives (including several free ones) to Google's desktop search.

[Adam]

Via John Battelle we found this eweek piece by Bruce Schneier:

The problem is that GDS indexes and finds documents that you may prefer not be found. For example, GDS searches your browser's cache. This allows it to find old Web pages you've visited, including online banking summaries, personal messages sent from Web e-mail programs and password-protected personal Web pages.

GDS can also retrieve encrypted files. No, it doesn't break the encryption or save a copy of the key. However, it searches the Windows cache, which can bypass some encryption programs entirely. And if you install the program on a computer with multiple users, you can search documents and Web pages for all users.

...Some people blame Google for these problems and suggest, wrongly, that Google fix them. What if Google were to bow to public pressure and modify GDS to avoid showing confidential information? The underlying problems would remain: The private Web pages would still be in the browser's cache; the encryption program would still be leaving copies of the plain-text files in the operating system's cache; and the administrator could still eavesdrop on anyone's computer to which he or she has access. The only thing that would have changed is that these vulnerabilities once again would be hidden from the average computer user.

In the end, this can only harm security.

GDS is very good at searching. It's so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about. And now that you know about them, pressure your software vendors to fix them. Don't shoot the messenger.

Well stated. I've found GDS very useful thus far, for what it's worth. But I haven't installed it on any machines I share with other people, nor am I inclined to anytime soon.

[Adam]

From the AP newswire...

Yahoo Adding Tool to Search Hard Drives

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Business Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc. is adding a tool to search computer hard drives as it scrambles to catch up with Google Inc. and stay a step ahead of Microsoft Corp. in the battle to help users sort through gobs of information on the Internet and the desktop.

Yahoo announced the plan late Thursday, but will wait until January to introduce the free tool for searching e-mails and a wide variety of other files stored on computers operate on Windows.

Unlike Google's desktop search tool, Yahoo's won't operate within a browser. The distinction means that Yahoo's desktop searches won't be co-mingled with online searches conducted at its Web site.

The product, licensed from a pioneering startup named X1 Technologies, seeks to cure a common computer-induced headache by making it as quick and easy to find digital information offline as it has become online.

With just 20 employees, X1 has established itself as a trailblazer in desktop search since starting three years ago. The private Pasadena-based company has been charging $74.95 for its search software and plans to continue to license its products to businesses even as Yahoo distributes a version for free.

The rush to develop better technology for scouring computer hard drives reflects a belief that desktop search is an increasingly important complement to online search engines, where advertising has become a major moneymaker.

Yahoo had been widely expected to take this step since Google introduced a hard-drive search tool nearly two months ago. Microsoft's MSN service hopes to introduce a similar product before year's end and Ask Jeeves Inc., which runs several online search engines, plans to unveil its desktop offering next Wednesday.

The competitive pressure likely motivated Yahoo to license an existing product.

"Some people may pooh pooh this because Yahoo didn't build it on their own, but this is going to give consumers some really good choices," said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li.

Both Yahoo and X1 contend it makes sense to maintain a dividing line between hard-drive search and Web search because one quest focuses on recovering old information while the other strives to discover new information.

"It's kind of like looking for information that you know exists and looking for information that you think might exist somewhere out there," said X1 president Josh Jacobs.

Keeping the two functions separate will also will help Yahoo do a more thorough job of searching hard drives, said Jeff Weiner, who oversees Yahoo's search division.

Yahoo, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., also says its product can sift through more than 225 different data types, including many formats that Google's desktop search can't index yet.

Neither Yahoo nor X1 disclosed financial details of their partnership. Yahoo already had spent about $2 billion to acquire much of the technology behind the online search engine that it introduced earlier this year to compete with Google, which is based in Mountain View, Calif.

"The ultimate vision is to create a dashboard to help people manage their digital lives," said Weiner.

John Battelle has more info and an update.

[Adam]

And now Ask Jeeves has a desktop search product, too. Here's some posts from John Battelle on the subject:

• Ask on Desktop Search
• Do We Really Need Another Desktop Search?

John reminds us that Lycos was in this game early as well. And Yahoo's partnership with X1 for Yahoo desktop search should come out in early 2005.

We have only seen the beginning of what Fishers are capable of. We may not go so far as CaptSolo's parody... but why not? ;)

[Adam]

John Battelle pointed at the New York Times, which refers to a Rice University team who discovered a composition security flaw in GDS. Apparently, though,

The Google desktop program includes an update feature that permits the company to automatically install new versions of the program on users' computers without user intervention or knowledge.

I'm not sure whether I should be relieved or frightened that the Fluffy Bunny running on my machine is able to fix itself with no warning (or ability for me to check) whatsoever.

[Adam]

Google Desktop Search is off Beta.

John Battelle points out the interesting features -- the most important of which are the APIs. The Google Group for GDS has so many posts I can't keep up.

Zwoddy likey support for Berkeley mbox format; rut roh Yahoo, time to ketchup. (And what's this about buying flickr? Stop getting distracted and keep your eye on the ball...)