Reinventing the wheel

I’m a bit confused to see Google Desktop for the Mac, although I’m not surprised. Ultimately, any new, useful and popular product I’m happy to greet with open arms.

Google Desktop is a desktop search application that gives you easy access to information on your Mac and from the web. Desktop makes searching your own email, files, music, photos, and more as easy as searching the web with Google.

Alright, I understand what it does and I’m all over any product that improves my ability to manage information. What I don’t understand is why something so much like Spotlight has been reinvented and delivered to the Mac. Why not simply improve Spotlight a bit by developing a Google Spotlight plugin? When it comes down to it, Google Desktop does very little that Spotlight doesn’t already do.

The key difference is simply where Google looks for information — it goes beyond your desktop, including web-based searches and information sources such as Google Mail.

When you get right down to it, Spotlight already has Google Mail covered. In my case, I have OS/X Mail store a local copy of all my mail services, going back into the mid 1990′s. As a result, my Spotlight searches include Google Mail messages as well as emails I composed before Google Mail even existed.

I wish people would stop thinking with the “not invented here” mentality. By delivering Google Desktop to the Mac, we now have two excellent products — Spotlight and Google Desktop — competing head-to-head. (In fact, it seems that there is some integration between them; for instance, Google uses Spotlight’s privacy settings to decide what parts of your disk not to index). It seems like it would have been so much better to build a Spotlight plugin that “reaches out” to Google and even Google Mail. It certainly would have been more elegant.

You might want to take a look at this very thorough article on Google Desktop before you install it. The user comments about rampant memory and processing power consumption are also worth considering. Personally, I’m content uses Safari for my Google web searches, and Spotlight for everything else. I’ll pass, at least this time around.