Thoughts on Google Desktop

Today I installed Google’s recently released beta Google Desktop. Although I only briefly skimmed a ZDNet review on this, and had some preconceived notions on what this product was like, I decided to download anyways. I have to say that after 15 minutes of using it I was definitely impressed!
I’m usually pretty good about organizing my personal and work projects and can generally find my files fairly easy. At least, that’s what I thought before using Google Desktop. I was amazed at how quickly the search results were produced, and had forgotten about many of the files/emails that turned up in the results. Sure enough after typing LDAP just now, I have 38 emails, 362 files, and 211 web history results displayed within 1 second.
The only negative that I see so far is that the beta has limited support for the applications that it indexes. Right now it’s primarily Outlook, Internet Explorer, and other MS product. I’ve definitely never been anti-Microsoft by any means, but have recently started migrating back to Mozilla. So far Firefox and Thunderbird have been fantastic! Feature-set superiority aside, I’ve been recommending to all my friends that they migrate over just due to the MS security problems alone.
At any rate, I think that Google Desktop will definitely be that much better as soon as it supports the Mozilla products (along with other popular email/browser/chat alternatives). But, with this being the only downside so far, I have to say that the desktop search is definitely interesting so far.