First official blog posting - Google Desktop Search
Well, this is my first official post to my own blog. I've been pretty apprehensive to get into the whole blog phenomenon although I have been a reader of many other blogs for the past year or so. So here is my own.
Yesterday I tried out Google's new Desktop Search product. I was a bit apprehensive at first, and I still am since it still hasn't finished indexing all my emails and files yet. It's up to about 450,000 indexed documents, most of which are emails. It is a pretty nice concept. Every time you search the web with Google, matching results from your own machine will appear at the very top in a special section of the search results (much like local directory results show up, or spelling corrections) in addition to the normal web results.
Being a software engineering, I naturally am curious as to the technology involved. I haven't tried to dig in yet, but I'm not sure what I'd be able to find out. Here's a link to dowload it and try it yourself: Google Desktop
While on the topic of searching, I also tried out a new product called SearchBlox 2.0. For those Java developers out there, this product is essentially a commercialized version of the Open Source Lucene full text search engine. Lucene is a great API, but it has a very high learning curve in my opinion. I don't personally have hours and hours to write my own document indexer just to get it to the point where I can actually run a search on something, although I will some day I swear! Anyway, SearchBlox is pretty sweet! They have a free version that allows you to index up to 1000 documents (HTML, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, TXT, etc). It has built in indexers for all these document types and can crawl using HTTP or the file system. So far, HTTP crawling has been, understandably so, MUCH faster than file system crawling. I love it so far. If this is the power of Lucene, I'm going to have to check it out. Go here to check it out.
Yesterday I tried out Google's new Desktop Search product. I was a bit apprehensive at first, and I still am since it still hasn't finished indexing all my emails and files yet. It's up to about 450,000 indexed documents, most of which are emails. It is a pretty nice concept. Every time you search the web with Google, matching results from your own machine will appear at the very top in a special section of the search results (much like local directory results show up, or spelling corrections) in addition to the normal web results.
Being a software engineering, I naturally am curious as to the technology involved. I haven't tried to dig in yet, but I'm not sure what I'd be able to find out. Here's a link to dowload it and try it yourself: Google Desktop
While on the topic of searching, I also tried out a new product called SearchBlox 2.0. For those Java developers out there, this product is essentially a commercialized version of the Open Source Lucene full text search engine. Lucene is a great API, but it has a very high learning curve in my opinion. I don't personally have hours and hours to write my own document indexer just to get it to the point where I can actually run a search on something, although I will some day I swear! Anyway, SearchBlox is pretty sweet! They have a free version that allows you to index up to 1000 documents (HTML, Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, TXT, etc). It has built in indexers for all these document types and can crawl using HTTP or the file system. So far, HTTP crawling has been, understandably so, MUCH faster than file system crawling. I love it so far. If this is the power of Lucene, I'm going to have to check it out. Go here to check it out.
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