Google Desktop Search Beta for Mac OS X Released

Two and a half years after the release of Google Desktop Search for Windows, the development team released a beta version of the program for Mac OS X. Starting today, users can download it on the Google Desktop website by clicking on this link . Following the release of GDS on Windows, Google Desktop Product Managers Rose Yao and Sundar Pichai put together a strong development team to port the program to Mac.

Like native Spotlight or third-party Quicksilver, GDS allows users to quickly find indexed computer content, including applications, music, photos, iChat logs, email and other documents.

“Most of the information that is very important for the user is not on the Web - it is on the user's computer, whether it be a PC or a Mac,” Yao said. “We want users to make it easier to find data.”

I would also like to note the possibility of indexing mail with Gmail and browsed web pages, so you do not need to be connected to the Web to view them. And for paranoid people, there is a function to disable all these features :)

Yao said that all indexed information is stored in a text file on a hard disk, which usually weighs no more than one gigabyte. “Despite the fact that I keep all documents and letters from the time I was in elementary school, now the index file weighs a few megabytes,” she says (probably joking :)).

Now GDS for Mac is inferior to its ancestor, who works under Windows - so far there are no sidebars with gadgets, only a quick search is available. However, he is very good and searches for files much faster than his native Spotlight (but about the same as Quicksilver)! A quick search is called up by double pressing the Command key, although at the discretion of the user this key can be changed to any other, but the standard window call is very convenient and it seems to me that nothing needs to be changed.

Search results are automatically displayed in the pop-up menu at the bottom as you type a query, sorted by relevance (just like in Google Suggest). However, the user can display all the results at once in his browser window. By the way, Safari, Firefox and Camino are now supported.