Product Reviews

Google has a history of developing for the PC and then porting to the Mac, so its Desktop searching application was bound to appear sooner or later. Turns out it was sooner. At heart, Google Desktop for Mac is a replacement for Spotlight, but by integrating with your Mac's internal web server, it has far more sophisticated filtering options should you choose to reach beyond the initial results screen.

It runs as a background process, which is called up by two taps of the command key (tweakable to whatever you prefer), and when active looks like a Widget that's broken free of the Dashboard environment. Start typing into the search box and live results pop up in a second or so. Carry on typing and they'll update in real time.

The local files it returns encompass your documents, images and music, as well as the applications installed on your Mac, giving you a shortcut to applications not residing in your Dock. It's not only a local search, though, as Desktop also searches Google - what else - and your Gmail, should you choose.

Being best known for its online properties, it's not surprising Google has chosen to present full result listings in a browser, rather than a Spotlight-like standalone application. The template is served up by your

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Mac's internal web server, and it looks very much like Google's own online search results. It even has familiar filters at the top of the screen through which you can isolate just emails, files, media or 'others', which includes applications. Results can also be sorted by relevance or date.

Once installed, Google Desktop indexes your files. Unfortunately, it doesn't use the same database as Spotlight, so if you intend to switch to Google Desktop, you'll end up with two hefty indexes hogging space on your drive. If you have limited capacity, this could be an issue, but at least it respects your Spotlight Privacy List, and ignores specified folders when building its initial index.

Extensive settings let you fine-tune the way Google Desktop works, and how it presents your results. This includes showing or hiding a Dock icon and doing the same with an entry in the menu bar, neither of which is strictly necessary, as it's best used with a keyboard shortcut anyway.

On a 1.8GHz iMac G5 with 768MB of Ram, we found Google Desktop to be a far faster search tool than Spotlight, although the payoff was sometimes a slightly smaller set of results. It turned up 411 hits for the term MacBook in just six seconds. Spotlight found 574, but took 34 seconds. A search for MacUser turned up just 5370 hits in Google Desktop, compared with Spotlight's massive 14,116, but while Google took only four seconds, Spotlight took 22. However, Google won hands down when searching for StuffIt and Excel. It turned up 34 hits in three seconds for StuffIt, compared with Spotlight's 31 in five seconds, and found 2243 references to Excel in just four seconds, which was a third the amount of time it took Spotlight to find just 1690.

The upshot of these tests? We'll be deleting our Spotlight catalogue right away and switching wholesale to Google Desktop.