So Adam Sez to Eve, "Better Stand Back, I Don't Know How Big This Thing is Gonna Get."
I've been a huge fan of Google Desktop Search since it arrived on the scene. I downloaded the beta on the first day that it was available. I rant about it almost as much as I rant about the greatness of The Holy Tivo. I love this thing. It's my homepage.
All that said, I can't believe what the non-beta version of the Google Desktop Search is doing to me.
I use a laptop with a 18 GB hard drive. Space isn't exactly at a premium on the machine, but it's not infinite, either. I knew that the beta version of Google Desktop Search used a reference file (it's a .CF1 file) to enable its particular brand of document retrieval. I knew this file was a biggie -- last I checked it was more than 150 MB.
Two days after installing the new version, this file is almost 800 MB! I'm having to move files off the machine! How big is this thing going to get? I feel like I'm in a 1950's horror flick, chased by the slowly creeping blob!
Maybe it was in the fine print, but... Google, baby, I would have appreciated a warning before you starting eating the hard drive that you're supposed to chronicle.
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technology
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Well, the Google Desktop Search blob seems sated, having consumed ~800 Mb of my precious hard disk.
Relatively certain that its ravenous march is momentarily halted, I'd like to relate my favorite feature in this new release: The 15 Minutes of Freedom
Last November, I speculated that Google Desktop Search engineers were not in any rush to support Firefox. My thinking was that leaving Firefox unsupported left them with a means of surreptiously surfing without cached results (or embarassing preferences URLs) appearing on their computers.
A key feature in the full version of Google Desktop Search confirms that anonymous web-browsing was on the mind of Google's engineers. This version of GDS grants its users 15 Minutes of Freedom.
Right-clicking on the GDS icon allows you to "pause indexing;" however, in the beta version, this merely turned off GDS after delivering a warning message.
In the full version, selecting "pause indexing" turns off GDS for 15 minutes -- during which time you can ask for additional 15 minute increments for GDS to rest. Anything you do or look at during this period will not appear in your desktop search results.
I'll give you three guesses on how they settled on 15 minutes.
Boy, I bet that was an uncomfortable product meeting.
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