Google 2.0 new release
Google Desktop Search released another update this week and launched a new blog specifically dedicated to their desktop search product. The highlights of the new release aren't earth shattering for the desktop organization world.
One major update was their approach to push more features into the product for management of deployments and security in order to make the tool more attractive to enterprise users. I am not sure how this effects X1, who is still by far the clear leader in the Enterprise implementations of desktop search but it doesn't look like Google has overtaken the X1 product with this version. There are still plenty of big capabilities for integrating X1 into corporate infrastructures as well as a business model focused around doing the proper integration and management of the deployments that make X1 a more likely choice for companies looking to make desktop search a strategic IT asset. But by adding in some capabilities Google can give the Google die-hard IT folks the ability to appease their naysaying bosses.
The sidebar application framework update makes it easier to add sidebar applications to the GDS sidebar interface. In general this will become a very useful function in the long run but the challenge with sidebar type interfaces is that there are so many places for them to pop into the world as new heads to an organizer application. Places to put them include Outlook, browsers (IE and Firefox), desktop toolbars (not search sidebars but the general areas available on the Microsoft desktop), and within business applications like ACT! or accounting systems. Unfortunately the sidebar development world doesn't have a common system for doing the implementation of these so folks like Viapoint with clever applications have to create an adapter for each application. It isn't the end of the world, but it is tough to prioritize making a plugin for the new technology search interfaces before one for Outlook or the browser, which are ubiquitous applications. But the good news is that they are hard at work making it easy to build and install plugins to the the sidebar interfaces and in general that is a good thing.
Another major feature touted in this new release are a mapping capability which to me seems to be more of a solution to integrate Google's search and advertisements into the desktop search world than to think about important things that people want to do while searching their desktop. Mapping is useful when I bring-up a contact that I need to drive to provided it remembers a bunch of my addresses to give driving directions, but I don't really see the benefit to the maps yet. I have an idea for Google - why not make it possible to search my blog through desktop search? It's built using blogger? It seems like the desktop search folks and the blogger/blog search folks should be thinking in a more aligned fashion. The maps are far less personal than the blogs people write and the blogs that they read. And what about Picasa?
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