Thursday, October 14, 2004

Desktop Search

Google Unveils Desktop Search, Takes on Microsoft

About time. Like many, I've often wondered why Google can search a billion webpages in a blink of an eye, but it takes an eternity to search for a simple document on your own computer.

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous1:44 PM

    In a word-- indexing.

    You have to create an index of all the documents in order to search quickly, much like Google does of the web. Windows doesn't do this by default-- it would certainly slow things down while it's going on. Unix systems do indexing for precisely this purpose-- but they update the index (a time and CPU intensive process) at around 3 to 4 am, expecting the computer to be left on all the time and that those times will be free.

    ReplyDelete