Dave Goldmaker

I’ve been trying out Google Desktop for a while now, here’s my experiences from start-to-finish..

Installation is fairly simple, just the usual click of the next, next, next, NEXT! button.

It wants to close all of your browsers, i said NO! because i’ve got loads on the go (as usual!) in multiple browsers, both opera and firefox – it wanted to close both!

Now, it took up the right-hand 100 pixels on my screen.  My screen is fairly large, but even still i’m not really happy about using up that amount of real estate on my screen.  You can thankfully re-size it to around a 50 pixel width.

Another thing google desktop does apart from fancy widgets like clocks and calendars, is index all of the documents on your computer.. without asking you!

I’m not too keen on the idea on software indexing my hard disk, especially a large public company like google doing that! I turned it off, then i minimized google desktop (who need’s widgets all the time, or at all!)

Minimizing the widget bar makes google’s search take up a chunk of your task manager, which you can turn off thankfully again, but it took me a while to figure out how to do it (right-click, None under floating deskbar which is a really pants search box)

Also, on the privacy side of things, it has “advanced features” only at the expense of everything you do with google desktop going to google – they say it’s anonymized.. yeah right, believe that you’ll believe anything..

Why would i want to use google desktop? Someone who’s rss-crazy and wants to see their news feeds every 10 seconds?

I really think its a bit of a distraction, and compared to apples spotlight search and dashboard, its pretty pants really. 

In comparison to spotlight, google’s search box is there all the time but with apple’s spotlight, its a click, open the search box, and it shows you results as you type.  Dashboard, hit F11 and its there, hit it again and its gone – google has to learn to be less intrusive.

The actual results is a mixture of web and documents on your machine. It does not a bad job, it is google after all – its the intrusiveness of the software that’s the problem… it just is too much of an eyesore and distraction to be there all the time..

Closing google desktop ALWAYS asks you are you sure? with a tickbox that is ALWAYS checked to start google desktop when my computer starts.  This is very annoying as well!

Ok, thats my rant over, i’ve had enough of it.. Maybe i’ll try a new version if it comes out but this one sucks BIG time.

I’ll soon be starting my mailing list soon where you can get my latest advice on technology, and i’ll be talking about my new product ideas and you can give me feedback on what you think.

Over and out,

Dave Goldmaker

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