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What’s the point of Google Desktop Mac?

When I arrived home from vacation last week I saw the news that Google Desktop was released for the Mac. All excited, I downloaded it and installed it. However, it’s not really necessary on a Mac.

Google Desktop

When Google Desktop came out for Windows, it was great. The main reason was becasue it gave Windows a good search application. The built in windows search is slower than hell and I don’t think that dog could find his tail in less than five minutes.

On a Mac though, search has always been fast. For years it’s taken only a few seconds to search for anything. When 10.4 came out, Spotlgiht gave search even more focus and really showcased a great internal search.

To me, Google Desktop is just another Spotlight. And I have plenty of them with Butler and Quicksliver apps just to name a few. Google Desktop doesn’t give me much more.

The only unique feature I see is that it searches Gmail too. That’s nice, but only if you are a hard core Gmail user. I use Gmail quit a lot, but not so much that I need it built into my computers internal search.

Don’t get me wrong, Google Desktop looks good and functions well, but it seems pointless when Macs already have a fantastic internal search.


6 Responses

  1. Daniel says:

    Couldnt agree more. Don’t need Google taking over my Mac anyway. Spotlight works great!

  2. Stephan H says:

    You guys have it soooooo right. Desktop is a lame app that does everything you already have on your Mac. I can not deny Google has made some other good stuff but this is not one of them.

  3. Thomas says:

    I think Google has more plans for Google Desktop, but only time will tell. They do have a very talented Mac guy there though. 🙂

  4. Cameron Reilly says:

    Google Desktop also allows you to search the web quickly from the one query. AFAIK you can’t do that from Spotlight.

  5. Walter A. says:

    This is pointless on a Mac. As the original post points out, Spotlight got this down pat since OSX Tiger, and Leopard even lets you use Spotlight to search Safari’s browsing history!

    As far as searching GMail, if you use it a lot, like I do, you probably already have your GMail account set up in Mail, which means Spotlight will work for this too, particularly if you set it up as an IMAP account.

    Incidentally, the new Google Gadgets for Mac also falls flat, as I have yet to see the available range of Google Gadgets come even close to the quality and variety of Widgets available for Dashboard.

  6. Anonymous Anon says:

    Google desktop searches through the text of all previously visited websites, which spotlight can’t do.

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