Ever since switching to Mac, I have lamented the loss of the Windows Explorer. Not only did I consider its interface more efficient and ergonomic, but finding files was MUCH easier than with Spotlight on OS X.
I'd tried older versions of Google Desktop on Windows XP, but never found them to really be of enough use to make it worth keeping them. But having lost a decent disk search on Mac (or having found one so unintuitive that I gave up on it), I decided to try the new Google Desktop for Mac.
It's again a different interface than Windows explorer, and by default searches in way too many ways. If I put in "SVG" as my search term, it comes up with documents that have SVG in the name, SVG in their text, etc. If you're going to make Google desktop work better for you, you need to know its query language, though that's not hard to learn. Here are a few tips:
Quotes For Exact Phrases
If you want to search for "fifty dogs" with one word following the other, put quotes around it. Without quotes, you'll get back every hit with "fifty" or "dogs" in it. The quotes make sure it finds that exact phrase.
Plus for Must
Let's say you want every file that has both "fifty" and "dogs" in it, but they don't have to be together. You would want to search for +fifty +dogs. The plus means that all search results must include both search terms.
Minus For Less
Let's say you want every file that has both "fifty" and "dogs" in it, but want to excluse any file that also has the word "cats" in it. You'd search for +fifty +dogs -cats or +"fifty dogs" -cats.
Tell It Where To Search
If you just enter "fifty" as your search term, you'll get e-mails and files where "fifty" occurs in the file name and in the file content. But let's just say you want it in the file name. if you search for filename:fifty then it will only display files with "fifty" in the file's name. If you just want to search for SVG files, you can search for filetype:svg.
You can also search specific fields in e-mail, such as Subject:, To:, From:, CC:, and BCC:. You can also use date, dateto: and datefrom: to limit the results to files created within a certain date range. For more information on dates, see the Google Desktop help entry on refining searches.
Pros and Cons
Pros: Easier and faster than Spotlight in my experience.
Cons: Mail searching for anything but Gmail relies on Spotlight. So if your mail client doesn't have a Spotlight plugin available, you're SOL. And if you use Thunderbird, some inconsistencies between Thunderbird's mail storage method and Spotlight's indexing methods, combined with a Thunderbird for Mac bug, make for difficulties in creating a Spotlight plugin for Thunderbird. If I recall correctly, it indexed Thunderbird e-mail in the Windows version, so you'd think it wouldn't be difficult to port that functionality to the Mac version, particularly since both the Windows and Mac versions of Thunderbird use the same standardized mailbox format. Of course the Thunderbird for Mac bug might make that a problem no matter how the mail was indexed.
Also, it seems that if you try to combine some of the "Tell it where to search" elements noted above, they cancel each other out and leave you with no search results. For example, I have a large clip art collection of source files I use for my drawing site. So if I want to search for an SVG type file with "Santa" in the filename, you'd think the search term would be +filetype:svg +filename:santa. If I just use the filename: option, I get all my SVGs with "Santa" in the name, but everything else (like all my Christmas music with "Santa" in the song title). If I then try to limit that to just SVG files, I get no results.
Final Thoughts
Google Desktop for Mac has some nice features that make it useful, especially if you find Spotlight frustrating. But the second con above really limits that usefulness in a big way, making it more of a toy than a real tool. Hopefully Google will address some of these issues soon, but right now I don't consider it ready for primetime.
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