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Google desktop search and junk mail filtering
April 11, 2008
Apple’s System-level search is not to my liking. I don’t like the fact that it takes off searching even before I have finished typing the search criteria. I also like to tarket my searches, limiting the disks or the servers I want it to search. The results of Apple’s search engine are useful, but using the software is enervating.
I was told by a friend about the
Google Desktop search software. I decided to give it a try, and I have been favorably impressed.
Google Desktop software allows me to search my local computer using the same search technologies Google uses online. This is the Google search window.
Based on the same kind of search capability that the online Google searches have, the desktop version, when first installed, scours your desktop computer and indexes the entire thing. It reads all of your e-mails, indexes their content, recipients, senders, etc.; then it reads all of your files, folders, and everything on your computer, and makes these items searchable. The “scouring” part takes days – seriously. In the process, Google Desktop searches every document on your computer – every e-mail, every photo, every document.
When I want to search for something, I tap the Command key twice and a search window pops up in the middle of the screen. Google indexes everything it finds in locally-generated web pages using (in my case) the Safari browser. It lists every occurrence of my search terms in e-mails, documents and media, allowing me to narrow the search for items according to their category.
I’ve been using Google Desktop for about a month now, and so far I am pretty happy. It allows me to find what I am looking for almost every time, and it allows me to locate the associated file with one click. That’s a handy tool.
Once Google Desktop has completed its search, the results are presented in a list. When expanded, it displays in my browser. In this example I have searched for the term "WHAMOBASS" which resulted in many files being found. Once found, I can sort by e-mail, documents and media.
I’m also switching my incoming e-mail server to run through
Google’s Message Filtering software. The sheer volume of junk mail coming in to my server has increased to the point where it is a burden on my time. I spend too much of each day attempting to build more clever filters to delete the junk mail. But, alas, I give up. Instead, I’m switching to the Google service which filtes the mail for $3.00 per client address per year. That’s an incredible bargain that I am sure I will enjoy in the months and years to come.
Google is obviously answering the needs of small business and individual users with their software offerings, and I am a happy customer.
Posted by Brian Lawler on April 11, 2008 | Comments (2)
