The Google blog has detailed a number of Google products being discontinued. Most of them I’ve never heard of (Aardvark?) or considered of doubtful use (Google Pack).
But the really disappointing cheap cialis online one for me is the end of Google Desktop.
In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
I really like the way Google Desktop can simultaneously search my local documents, emails in Thunderbird, and in GMail as well. I suppose I’d better learn more about Windows 7 Search — does it even offer the same capabilities?
Windows 7 Search is great for searching local files and launching programs but doesn’t search gmail. Try Cloud Magic for Gmail, Google Apps Email, Docs, Calendar & Contacts. It’s a lot faster than the native Gmail search. Apparently they are supporting Twitter search soon.
In my opinion, Windows XP’s search bar had nothing on the capabilities of Google Desktop. My workplace banned Google Desktop and I’ve not tried using Search on Windows 7 because of my dissatisfaction with the search bar on XP.
Windows 7 search is rubbish, compared with Google Desktop. My workplace also banned Google Deskop – there must be a cult of IT admins who prefer tobelieve conspiracy theories about Google gathering personal and corporate data, rather than read the terms of use.
Google Desktop, for example, can index folders on network drives and I find this very useful because all of my work is stored on network drives (the local hard disk isn’t backed up). For Windows 7 search to search a network drive, the drive has to be ‘available offline’, which means Windows creates a copy of the ENTIRE drive on the local hard disk – not an index, a COPY. It doesn’t tell you it’s doing this – you just notice your available hard disk space dwindling to nothing, several hours after you’ve turned on the feature. It’s a hidden file so I had to Google (ironically) to find out what was going on. Then I turned off the network feature of Windows search and installed Google Desktop anyway.
Google Desktop wasn’t upgraded to work with Outlook 2010 so it was useless for me for searching email anyway – it was only good for file searching. I’ve removed it now and installed Copernic instead. I’ll have to pay for it soon (once I’m happy that it works well), but it’s better than nothing, and certainly better than Windows 7 search.
I was shocked at the discontinuation of GDS. Does anyone know of a search engine that works like GDS “Browse Timeline” feature and/or know of a search engine that can read GDS’s index – I have many deleted files and came to rely on the cache in GDS. Thanks.
I might note that my copy of GDS continues to run okay, though I haven’t checked if it’s still indexing my Gmail.