Re: Google Desktop Search Released for Linux

["Joe Shaw" <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On 6/28/07, Sean Carlos <sean carlos gmail com> wrote:

> 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.

I ran GDL from Thursday until this morning, and it's just hammered my
system.  I had to kill it this morning because my load average was
over 4 (whereas it's normally under 1) and the desktop was extremely
sluggish.

> Interesting Google desktop features include versioning and cache views
> of deleted documents.  The contextual result snippets are great.

It also displays hits from mbox files right in the browser which is a
nice touch.  I haven't played with the versioned documents yet though.

What do you mean by contextual result snippets?

> 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.

By default both GDL and Beagle sort by date.  I doubt relevancy will
be much better though; unlike web search there aren't many connections
between individual pieces of data (which would count out PageRank);
most of the data is siloed per application.  There is also less of it
and less computing power to do much statistical analysis over the
larger body.  I'd guess it's probably term frequency based like
Beagle's, but I have to investigate further.

Joe