Google Desktop for Mac: Gmail, MailTags
Google has launched a Mac version 
of its Desktop search app.
Windows users have been able to use this for a while now as a kind of poor man’s Spotlight. Now it comes to Mac and brings with it several tricks that Spotlight can’t do. Hardcore Googlistas will love it.
As you would expect, it is able to search your drives for applications, files, emails and folders. But unlike Spotlight, it is also able to search your Gmail messages and web browsing history at the same time.
Desktop for Mac installs itself as a system-wide Preference Pane, where you can set the app’s options, including whether or not to include Gmail and your web-browsing history in the search results:
Another pane allows you to set the hotkey for Google Desktop (⌘ + ⌘ by default) and to determine how results are displayed.
Hitting the hotkey calls up a nicely-crafted search box. A search for “journo” lists emails from Mail.app and Gmail in one hit which is very handy, complete with a little snippet for each one, something I often wish Spotlight could provide:
In an extra nice touch for MailTags users like me, Google has made sure that the app is compatible with existing mdimporters. That means it recognises MailTags keywords, projects and notes and displays them in the results.
You can download Google Desktop for Mac from Google’s Mac software page .
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April 5th, 2007 at 1:36 am
That’s funny, Spotlight already indexes my web history and gmail. I use mail.app to download my gmail mail, so that’s indexed. And I use firefox with the Slogger extension to archive copies of all webpages I visit, so those files are indexed as well.
I’m not really sure what google desktop would add to that?
April 5th, 2007 at 1:42 am
Excellent. I recommend not using it then. :)
April 5th, 2007 at 1:52 am
What GD4M adds is a visual representation of data in a format that is not like spotlight’s. I like how google uses my browser and I can switch between data types in the browsers interface. I like it better, but YMMV :)
April 5th, 2007 at 2:04 am
Personally, I like the snippets feature a lot.
I often can’t remember exactly what a particular file contains. The snippets are an excellent reminder.
April 5th, 2007 at 2:21 am
Fair enough, I wasn’t being flippant, it was an honest question. :-)
How big is the google index data? My spotlight data is already 850mb, I’d hate to have another gig for google. Maybe I should just try both out and switch to whichever I like better.
Thanks for the comments.
April 5th, 2007 at 11:47 am
Don’t forget, Spotlight in Leopard is going to get even better.
I have run Google Desktop on my Windows server at work for at least 2 years. While there is nothing wrong with it, the other little things it does are not serious or necessary. For a Mac user to encumber his system with a second indexing tool is pointless, I think. And when Leopard comes out, that should be even more true.
April 6th, 2007 at 12:51 pm
Beware: this thing is a cycle hog…
April 8th, 2007 at 5:38 am
I’m not sure about GD. I installed it, and while it was neat to see my files on my Google searches in my web browser, I use Spotlight only in Finder windows, and QuickSilver for the rest. But what really concerns me is that I discovered last night, that I could no longer empty my trash–something about not having sufficient priveleges or access to some of the files–without it telling me what files. To make things weirder, even with only one file, I could not do anything to empty my trash… Then, I tried launching Disk Utility to repair my permissions–and it wouldn’t finish launching. I couldn’t get a window to appear. I next tried Disk Warrior, and it wouldn’t open either, with an “unexpected problem.” Also, for the past few days, my hard drive has been thrashing constantly–all day and night. I booted from my secondary admin account, and was able to get both a permissions repair to run and from external, a repair of the hard drive (which didn’t turn up anything). What was really weird was that I still couldn’t empty the trash from within my main account. I finally remembered that GD was running, and I turned off indexing, rebooted, and discovered that I could empty my trash again. I did so much there at the end, that it’s hard to say that removing GD is what fixed my problem, but I do know that nothing else worked until I turned it off… In the end, I just went and uninstalled the whole thing–it’s not worth it to me. I wonder if anybody else has had weird problems like this…
-Jon
April 12th, 2007 at 5:48 pm
I actually tried this out
While it’s search was pretty speedy , simple and cool (3 keywords I’ll bet Hawky here likes) there is a few design decisions I don’t think were very smart. That of figuring out wheter it is still indexing or not and how long is to go on the indexing . Also the ability to pause and resume the indexing process. Of all the reports of it being buggy and slow the majority of reports appear to be from users who haven’t realised that No the indexing ain’t done yet
GD’s index appears to be more effiicient than Spotlights which is a very good reason to use it. But it’s currently barely beta software (alpha quality more like)……
April 13th, 2007 at 9:04 am
@Jon, I started to experience some really weird things too. I’ve gotten rid of it.
April 13th, 2007 at 10:17 am
After all my talk about not needing it, I did give it a whirl and was disappointed myself. Same problems mentioned above about the indexing process, but also the fact that it appears to not be doing what it says it’s supposed to do in terms of indexing filevault according to the way the FAQ says it does. I think I’ll let it bake for a little while longer.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:11 pm
@Tim-
I tried it a second time–without MailTags, and while I didn’t experience the same flakiness, it was still weird–but in the end, I realized that my hard drive is just too full to use it right now. I posted a bug report feedback on Google’s pages, and I recommend others do the same. I think this utility has promise, and the more feedback, the better the product will be.
-Jon
June 17th, 2007 at 4:41 am
Shortly after installing Google desktop, and concluding it didn’t add much except an unfamiliar UI, I found my Mail searches of message contents had stopped working. Then I noticed Spotlight’s main UI was not searching emails either. Then my backup program croaked, which I traced to a 1.5GB log file generated by mdimport as it started and crashed five times per minute (or was it per second). Eventually all this traced to an incompatibility between MailTags.mdimpurter and Google desktop. Removing MailTags importer puts things back to normal (I think).
One heck of a lot of inconvenience resulted from “too many cooks in the broth”. Maybe Google desktop need to play better with Spotlight and Mail, MailTags.
June 18th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
This incompatibility has been resolved in MailTags 2.0 — It was more of an issue in MailTags 1.x importer than in Google desktop — Google couldn’t do anything about it until I fixed the issue. (Which I did in February before the Google Desktop for Mac release)