Extending the Reach of Google’s Desktop Search

Friday, Nov. 19 2004 | Author: DarkBlue

Back in October, I told you about Google’s new Desktop Search program.

While most of the resulting comments were favourable, there was some criticism of the limited scope of the search afforded by the facility - those same criticisms were also widely expressed elsewhere.

Larry Gadea is working hard to address these limitations. With the release of GDSPlus, Gadea has widened the scope of Google Desktop Searches considerably.

With GDSPlus installed, Google Desktop Search can now index additional file types including (but not limited to): .xml, .sql, .bat, .log (mIRC and Trillian), .cs, .vb (Visual Studio .NET source code), .frm, .bas, .cls (Visual Basic 6 source code), .wpd (WordPerfect) and .rtf (Rich Text).

In fact, if you’re prepared to get your hands dirty in GDSPlus’ configuration files, you can have Google Desktop Search index ANY text file!

This is such a cool hack.

Category: Uncategorized

6 Responses for "Extending the Reach of Google’s Desktop Search"

JC

November 19th, 2004 at 4:05 pm
1

ooooh, xml. finally.
And the delphi guys will like it… they were jealous of us being able to instantly search all our .java files.
Aaron Feuer

November 19th, 2004 at 10:13 pm
2

I just finished writing another Google Desktop program called gdPlus (I created the name before I heard about GDSPlus).

It is basically a windows interface for Google Desktop that also supports advanced filtering.

Check it out @ http://www.airbearsoftware.com/gdplus/
Jonathan Hollin (DarkBlue)

November 20th, 2004 at 4:50 am
3

Excellent. Great work Aaron.
Andy

November 21st, 2004 at 12:37 pm
4

Unfortunately, it looks like this hack breaks the e-mail indexer, which was one of the most useful parts of Google Desktop Search for me because it’s infinitely faster and more powerful than Outlook’s search.
Jonathan Hollin (DarkBlue)

November 21st, 2004 at 5:46 pm
5

I’m not having any problems with it Andy.
Larry Gadea

November 21st, 2004 at 7:27 pm
6

To fix the broken email indexer, reinstall GDS and GDSPlus, but do not remove the registry entry/folder when installing GDSPlus. The problem comes from the fact that GDS stores email indexing info in the registry and deleting it confuses its indexers, heh. I should update the website to mention this :)