Sometimes a great notion

Sometimes a great idea or human being comes along. It makes us happy for maybe a minute, and then we tear it to pieces. Think Joost van der Westhuizen at 19 years of age, about whom each fool with a TV set had something to say at one time or another. Think Joan of Arc, John McEnroe, JD Salinger and Jesus Christ. Our track record as compassionate beings, eager to better ourselves, isn`t great.

Ken Kesey (author of Sometimes a Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo`s Nest) knew all about society`s tendency to visit reverse-natural selection upon its betters. So this column borrows his book title to pay homage to just such a great idea, in this case a technology that may yet find that greatness can be a lonely state.

I feel it necessary to give Google desktop search, launched on 14 October, plenty of warm and fuzzy, because it, ladies and gentlemen, is the stuff. The killer app, the reason IT is cool, the proof of concept, the bee`s knees and the consummate ease.

I feel it necessary to give Google desktop search, launched on 14 October, plenty of warm and fuzzy, because it, ladies and gentlemen, is the stuff.

Carel Alberts, special editions editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

What makes me so sure it is that great? I don`t have a crystal ball or a failsafe greatness detector. It`s not as if I know when a technology will survive blind-sides from privacy advocates and regulatory interventionists. But sometimes you see a perfectly awesome candidate, a winner that you have to stick your neck out for. And you know you should admit it when it happens, but people often don`t see it that way. You can almost hear their blood boil when faced with supremacy.

The Leonard Francis Grundy Foundation of North Carolina exemplifies the worst of such banal detractors. Grundy himself wrote a letter to ITWeb, levelling fantastic accusations and suppositions, none of them substantiated and with nary a correctly spelled word in sight. It baldly stated that Google`s desktop search was a "tool for the FBI and Department of Defence to access what we PC users do when ... online". Despite its ludicrousness, I quote the letter quite extensively. Maybe some good comes of it.

The letter talks about Big Brother, "an" office in Idaho employing top-notch government hackers set on exploiting Microsoft weaknesses (possibly a reference to Google itself capitalising on Microsoft`s failure to topple its search dominance), "oversea-ing" everything we do on PCs and "hindering users and damaging computers without being held accountable".

"Goggle", says the foundation, has no security tools that will offer the user any protection at all above the junk that is on the market - firewalls. It then signs off by saying, quite amusingly, that "we hope your company makes millions more through our suffering".

Before anyone pays any more attention to this kind of paranoid drivel, allow me to state the case for Google desktop. Much like Google rules search and Google News rules newsfeeds, Google desktop search is, as I say, the stuff.

Say you forget the spelling of Mthunzi Mdwaba`s name. Just type the part you remember and watch the returns flock in. The local files should tell you what you need to know, but Google has coupled this tool with its online facility, so online results are there too.

The integrated search looks like Google`s online search window, and may be accessed either via the desktop application or the Web. It searches all Office apps (also file names, so you don`t have to tag pictures with metadata) and an increasing number of other file types on your hard drive. It returns results within the regular sub-second time.

Convinced? If not, try the fact that it`s free and that the application, at 400KB, downloads in a very short time. It indexes files when your PC is idle for more than 30 seconds, and may take an hour or two to do so. But after that, indexing is automatic, and the app rifles through thousands of desktop and offline items in nanoseconds. Once installed, the Google home page will show a new "Desktop" link. This effectively integrates your desktop into Google. Only a fool would cry foul about security when seeing such wonders for the first time. Actually, by all means cry foul, but do so within reason, while acknowledging the greatness of what you`re seeing.

Still not sure? Try the fact that you don`t have to update your address book anymore. Just open Google and type in the contact`s name. If you`ve written it somewhere in a Word doc, it`ll come up, probably faster than any Office application, without the need to know where it is stored.

Never before have I had actual fun with search. Nat Friedman`s "dashboard" project is based on just such an idea - looking for files of all descriptions in one interface rather than have you conceive of its existence and the place of its existence, for instance Outlook, and having to then go there and try to find it at length. Windows Longhorn promised the phantasm of single-interface search based on a next-generation file system called WinFS, but there have been the usual delays. There are premium tools, but they`re premium.

I`m not too starry-eyed about convincing anyone of Google`s innate superiority, though. My father-in-law likes Jeeves. People like what they like. Of course, I`ll tell him about desktop Google, and all the other people he`s led astray with Jeeves, but I reckon he`ll just smile and put off learning about desktop search until Jeeves comes out with a version, or he`ll stick with factory-fitted local search.

Meanwhile, take it from me if you`re inclined to take it from people: this product keeps Google at the cutting-edge of search. It`s what you`ve come to expect from the wizards of search. I have almost nothing bad to say about it, other than to hope Google deals quickly with the privacy and security issues. Meanwhile, why demean the feeling of discovery?