Thunderbird support is done by installing a Thunderbird extension. This implies that TB has to be running for Google Desktop to be able to see the mails.
This seems to be true. I'm not yet sure how workable this will be once initial indexing is done. During initial indexing of very large mail stores (several years of accumulated data), Thunderbird becomes a memory hog, making my current system very sluggish (=not usable). It remains to be seen what happens once initial indexing is completed.
As for MS file support, my suspicion is that it doesn't have it. None of the obvious open source libraries for dealing with them are mentioned in their open source library page[1]. Joe
I can confirm that Google only is indexing file and path names of MS documents - they are not looking at the content. Nor are they looking at many of the other data sources Beagle currently handles well such as Liferea feeds and Evolution Contacts. Google Desktop file type support is currently too limited, in my view. Yet as a Thunderbird user, I will try run Google in parallel to Beagle until Beagle's new Thunderbird support is released.
Interesting Google desktop features include versioning and cache views of deleted documents. The contextual result snippets are great.
I'm looking forward to comparing result relevancy. Disc space and resource usage comparison would require a lab type setup to insure both tools were feed just documents indexable by each other - not my situation.
- Sean