Google Desktop for the Mac

ByMike Moffit

Google (one of my favorite companies) is now offering Google Desktop for the Mac as a 45mb free download. It offers “fast and easy search for your computer ” like Google offers for the web. Like Spotlight and Quicksilver, you can also use Google Desktop as an application launcher. Read more and download the application here:

http://desktop.google.com/en/mac

Read Daring Fireball’s great technical analysis of the Google Desktop’s installation and de-installation procedure here:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/google_desktop_installer

Google Desktop has been available for Windows PCs for about two and half years. Mac OS 10.4 features “Spotlight,” a similar tool for instantly finding programs, folders, and files and for launching applications on your Mac. In fact, Spotlight proceeded Google Desktop by several months.

However, Google Desktop is occasionally a bit faster than Spotlight, and has some neat tricks of it’s own – for example, Google Desktop can “remember” deleted files, it ties in with Google’s online search engine, and can even optionally tie into your Gmail account. Pretty cool.

In the blogoshere, most Mac users seem quite content with Spotlight, and only anticipate downloading Google Desktop to play with. However, Google is fairly aggressive about updating it’s free software offerings; it will be interesting to see how they develop Google Desktop for the Mac.

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