Google Desktop Comes to the Mac

Adam C. Engst wrote:
>> Why does everyone think that Google having an image of every file
>> you'll ever have is a great idea?
>
snip of some jokes ala Letterman's top 10 lists
 >
> cheers... -Adam
>
> PS: Seriously, here's a link to the Google Desktop privacy policy. If
> they're being honest, there's nothing much to worry about. And let's
> face it, if they're not, someone will sniff the traffic and call them
> on it in a big way fast, so I have no reason to believe they're
> dissembling.
>
> <http://desktop.google.com/mac/privacypolicy.html>

Some of us are a bit jaded. If they have the information some manager or
employee might use it in ways that are maybe inappropriate or even
illegal. Companies are staffed by employees who come and go and are in
the end human with all the weaknesses that implies. Some of those
weaknesses are moral based. Others are in the area that people make
mistakes. I'd think long and hard before using it on my home office
computers or those of my clients. Not that I wouldn't use it, but like
backup policies, we'd address it before a blanket OK is issued.

I also realize I'm not the average "Joe". :)

I have twice had Google Desktop Daemon become unresponsive, chewing up close
to 90% of one of my two CPUs, for an extended period until I killed it. The
whole system was sluggish when this happened.
--

Allen Watson

Moe Rubenzahl wrote:
>> I think that it has seriously slowed down my system (lots of
>> spinning beach balls), even though it is no longer indexing. ...
> Me too.
& me too, but it may speed up my searching?

*'**How can I refine my search? *Because Google Desktop stores a lot of
information, search queries can often use some refinement. ...you can
narrow your search by using the following advanced operators: If you
enclose your query in quotation marks, Desktop only returns items
containing the exact quoted phrase, for example: "digital camera" will
ensure your search returns the exact phrase.' Desktop help included 7
tricks: all that modern man can remember.

Does Spotlight have sets of search tricks I've never encountered, either?

George

On Apr 6, 2007, at 3:26 PM, David Ross wrote:

> Some of us are a bit jaded. If they have the information some
> manager or
> employee might use it in ways that are maybe inappropriate or even
> illegal.

The privacy concerns are not the reason I'm not installing Google
Desktop. In fact, I don't even have to think about it.

The reason is the use of an Input Manager--I like having all of my
machines as Input Manager free zones.

   --John

The application has been running for several days on my PB and has only indexed 20,000 files and is progressing very slowly. I read the initial impressions on Joe's article and this seems to be a general issue. I do like the application but have decided to uninstall until a fix is found. Is there a definitive solution yet?

[If you have MailTags installed, you may have an old version of its Spotlight plug-in. (Look in ~/Library/Spotlight.) If that's the case, just remove that file (you can later reinstall the latest beta of MailTags to update it) and that should speed things up. -Joe]

Tony

On 8-Apr-2007, at 10:29, George Wade wrote:

> Does Spotlight have sets of search tricks I've never encountered,
> either?

Oh yes, oodles of tricks. (I almost said "googols of tricks, but
thought that might be confusing :)

FOr a start, there is the "Working with Spotlight" writeup at Apple:

<http://developer.apple.com/macosx/spotlight.html>

then download the Spotlight Metadata Attribute list

<http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Reference/
MetadataAttributesRef/index.html>

(Both of these require a ADC account, but include the free online ADC
account).

On 2007-04-09, at 04:29, George Wade wrote:

> Does Spotlight have sets of search tricks I've never encountered,
> either?

Only from the command line...

Find all the files containing '.htm' but not 'Favorites' in your home
folder:

mdfind -onlyin ~ "(kMDItemFSName =='*.htm*') && (kMDItemFSName !
='*Favorites*')"

Find all Text documents in the Test folder of your Desktop folder:

mdfind -onlyin ~/Desktop/Test "kMDItemContentTypeTree = 'public.text'"

Find files that are not labelled '6' (one of the available colors of
labels):

mdfind "kMDItemFSLabel != '6'"

Find all AppleWorks documents (do mdls on a file to find the tree):

mdfind "kMDItemContentTypeTree='com.apple.appleworks.cwk'"

On 9-Apr-2007, at 13:55, Tom Robinson wrote:
> On 2007-04-09, at 04:29, George Wade wrote:
>
>> Does Spotlight have sets of search tricks I've never encountered,
>> either?
>
> Only from the command line...

No.

> Find all the files containing '.htm' but not 'Favorites' in your home
> folder:
>
> mdfind -onlyin ~ "(kMDItemFSName =='*.htm*') && (kMDItemFSName !
> ='*Favorites*')"

Which you can do in the finder as well.

COmmand-F, click "Kind" pop-up chose "Other..."

Now, from that very LONG list, choose "Raw Query" (Add it to your
favorites while you're there)


type in (kMDItemFSName =='*.htm*') && (kMDItemFSName !='*Favorites*')"

Select the folders you want to search (Clicking "Others..." next to
the "Save" button, or "Home" or "Computer", &c)

And then, if you like, save it.

On 5/4/2007 11:39 PM, "ian mcgrady" <imcgrady1mac.com> spake thus:

> Why does everyone think that Google having an image of every file you'll ever
> have is a great idea?

I find it intriguing in the entire conversation so far that no-one has
commented on the fact that Spotlight already does what Google Desktop does
(i.e., indexes a large chunk of your file system). Both Apple and Google are
large corporations, so neither is really inherently more trustworthy than
the other. Yet there have been no diatribes about how "Apple has an image of
every file on my system", which they could do equally as well as Google, if
not better. Why does everyone trust Apple and not Google?

There's no such thing as "profound privacy", unless you fake your own death
and go live on top of a mountain in Bhutan or something. The only sure-fire
way to guarantee the safety of your personal data is to have none in the
first place. Failing that, don't connect to the Internet. Simple! Our
security lecturer always says that the most secure computer system is one
that is unplugged and buried in six feet of concrete. Realistically though,
Scott McNealy got it right: "You have no privacy. Get over it."

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger

After installing Google Desktop, my Mac Mini became nearly unusable. OK - so I only have the standard 512MB RAM, but switching between active applications became so slow that I had to resort to quitting one application before launching another (shades of Mac OS 6 without Multifinder for those of us who have been around Macs for a few years). I've just uninstalled it and deleted the indices and the Mac is much more responsive again. I'll be happy to revisit after reading the experiences of others because it does have some powerful features.



[I think it's worth trying again after seeing what people say about the next beta. -Adam]

When I was a Windoze sufferer, I tried Google Desktop on my Dell and
was simply not satisfied with the searches it did. The privacy issue
was there too. I found Copernicus much better and used it
extensively. Now that I've switched to Mac, I really like Spotlight
which just seems to do a better job of finding what I've hidden away
on these Macs I now have.

I have confidential client material on this and other Macs, which
while Spotlight will find it easily, I can only trust that Apple is
not also listening and reading. Not that they'd be interested in
sometimes really boring insurance discussions.

The fact is, Apple and Google have huge power over computer users,
but that power is coupled with a great deal of public trust. We
trust them implicitly not to read our files. If either of these
companies (and there are others in the same category) misuse that
trust, it is likely that individuals will go to jail, the SEC will
land on them hard, and the public trust gets squandered. Look what
happened with the recent HP scandal; heads rolled and people lost
very high level positions.

Just my two cents worth.

Dave Clark
www.clarklawfirm.com
http://home.earthlink.net/~dc1999/
http://web.mac.com/dave28c/

On 4/12/07, David Clark <dave28cmac.com> wrote:
> The fact is, Apple and Google have huge power over computer users,
> but that power is coupled with a great deal of public trust.

Not really. Oh sure, most people just assume it sorta works, because
there are enough people out there that are looking at evry packet
their computer sends out and analyzing it that if there ever is
personal information being sent back, the resulting firestorm will be
such that your Grandma that doesn't even OWN a computer will hear
about it.

It's Ronnie Reagan all over again, "Trust, but verify."

There's a lot of verifying going on. Anyone who is scared of google
reading their files with google desktop really needs to step up to the
tinfoil hat level of nuttiness.

--
<http://2blog.kreme.com/>

--On April 12, 2007 9:02:43 AM -0700 David Clark <dave28cmac.com> wrote:

> The fact is, Apple and Google have huge power over computer users,
> but that power is coupled with a great deal of public trust.

Why do you restrict this to these 2 companies? Any application you install
is capable of sending information to anywhere. This is exactly what spyware
and keyloggers do, fortunately mostly on Windows computers at the moment.
Most Windows spyware is installed voluntarily by end users that think they
are getting 1 thing, a neat free app, when they're really getting 2 things,
a free (usually buggy app) and the spyware (typically even buggier).

After installing on two machines- a G5 Dual 1.8 and a Macbook Pro 2.0, I experienced extreme problems. Neither machine completed indexing in a 3 day period. Both machines were slowed to a crawl and the G5 machine began to exhibit problems. The G5 was unable to launch applications and opening a new terminal produced a line of text "Too many processes, unable to fork."

Looking forward to a workable release!

At 1:49 PM -0700 4/12/07, Cerebus the Aardvark wrote:
>There's a lot of verifying going on. Anyone who is scared of google
>reading their files with google desktop really needs to step up to the
>tinfoil hat level of nuttiness.

I subscribe to an Apple listserv dedicated to issues important to
users who are either in the (US) Federal government or are
contractors to the government. When Google Desktop for the Mac was
announced, there was some discussion about it, though not nearly the
volume that has gone through TB-T. Mostly though, I think our
concerns were allayed by a post from one of Google's own Macintosh
developers. She wrote (and gave me permission to quote):


>>I'll add a couple [of] tidbits that I made sure were included to make it
>>more usable by government users, and that are different in the Mac
>>version (compared to the Windows version):
>>
>>(a) We did not include the "search across computers" feature that got
>>Google Desktop for Windows in hot water at some agencies. No user
>>content or index data is ever uploaded to Google, period. If you
>>turn on "usage statistics", that includes crash traces (it is a
>>beta), but even if Google Desktop crashes, those traces do not
>>include file names or contents, IP addresses, or any other user-
>>identifiable information. It does help us locate and fix bugs, but
>>we made sure to sanitize the data thoroughly before we send it to our
>>crash report server.
>>
>>(b) If you protect your home directory with FileVault, we put the
>>index for files in that directory inside the FileVault volume. This
>>ensures that index and cached revision information is protected just
>>as strongly as the files being indexed. I took particular care in
>>our internal design and security reviews to ensure that we do not
>>leak potentially confidential information outside of the FileVault
>>volume, so that data at rest is protected even if an adversary has
>>physical access to the machine and/or drive.

So Google is not uploading personal information from our computers to
the Googleplex. And the indices are kept inside FileVault for privacy.

After installing on two machines- a G5 Dual 1.8 and a Macbook Pro 2.0, I experienced extreme problems. Neither machine completed indexing in a 3 day period. Both machines were slowed to a crawl and the G5 machine began to exhibit problems. The G5 was unable to launch applications and opening a new terminal produced a line of text "Too many processes, unable to fork."

I had a similar problem (similar "too many processes" errors) with my MacBook Pro 17" dual core. I noticed that the indexing had sort of hung up and was going very slowly after even 24 hours. So I removed two spotlight plugins (one for Mail Tags and one for something else) and tried rebooting. Didn't help. So I reinstalled Google Desktop and it took up indexing where it left off - at a MUCH faster clip - and was done in a few hours, and the errors went away.

Well worth the hassle - I love Google Desktop. As someone else said, it seems uncanny about finding the right thing toward the top of the list and I don't usually have that happen with Spotlight.

The only thing which I find annoying is that if I hit the double-command-key to get the little search blank to come up, type in my term and hit return without being able to stop myself, it seems to bring up a browser window and do a WEB search. Which is usually not what I wanted to do.

Sue

On Apr 13, 2007, at 7:31 AM, Kevin van Haaren wrote:

> --On April 12, 2007 9:02:43 AM -0700 David Clark <dave28cmac.com>
> wrote:
>> The fact is, Apple and Google have huge power over computer users,
>> but that power is coupled with a great deal of public trust.
> Why do you restrict this to these 2 companies? Any application you
> install
> is capable of sending information to anywhere.

There are software products like "Little Snitch" which watch network
traffic and let you know if an application "phones home" and sending
information you may not want to share. Little Snitch is available
from

<http://www.obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html>.

David Weintraub
davidweintraubworld.net
davidweintraub.name

On 13-Apr-2007, at 14:47, dfbills wrote:
> After installing on two machines- a G5 Dual 1.8 and a Macbook Pro
> 2.0, I experienced extreme problems. Neither machine completed
> indexing in a 3 day period. Both machines were slowed to a crawl
> and the G5 machine began to exhibit problems. The G5 was unable to
> launch applications and opening a new terminal produced a line of
> text "Too many processes, unable to fork."

Something, other than Google Desktop, is wrong with your machine
then. Did you check for any oddball spotlight modules?

Google Desktop indexed over a terabyte of drive space in under 2
days, and while I did uninstall it because of the constant disk
trashing even after it was done indexing, it certainly never
prevented apps from launching or shells from spawning. It was quite
modest in it's resource use, I thought, which is why the near
constant disk access surprised me.

I suspect you have a rogue spotlight plugin that GD exposed.

Google Kreme wrote:
> On 13-Apr-2007, at 14:47, dfbills wrote:
>> After installing on two machines- a G5 Dual 1.8 and a Macbook Pro
>> 2.0, I experienced extreme problems. Neither machine completed
>> indexing in a 3 day period. Both machines were slowed to a crawl
>> and the G5 machine began to exhibit problems. The G5 was unable to
>> launch applications and opening a new terminal produced a line of
>> text "Too many processes, unable to fork."
>
> Something, other than Google Desktop, is wrong with your machine
> then. Did you check for any oddball spotlight modules?
>
Maybe. But then again Google COULD have a bug. :)

At 4:39 AM -0700 2007/04/05, Bryon Boyce wrote:

>As a test, I performed identical desktop searches with my new copy
>of Google Desktop and the standard Macintosh find function. An
>interesting discovery is that the Mac Find does not check the entire
>filename- occurrence of the search term late in a long filename
>results in it not being found. Not so with the Google Desktop
>search, which found these, as well as occurrences within the text.
>Also noticeable was the fact that the Google product also displays
>sound files within a folder named with the search term. This
>indicates that location with an appropriately named folder is
>understood by Google Desktop to merit inclusion in search results,
>as I don't think it searched the sound file and its name did not
>include the search term. The search term was in the album name as
>displayed by iTunes; does Google search this area?

        Presumably those are the ID3 tags stored inside MP3s (and AAC
files, AIUI). If you use Get Info on a track in iTunes, and there's
anything in the text (or graphic) fields other than track name, it's
probably stored in ID3 tags. iTunes' Summary tab shows "ID3 Tag:" on
the right side, identifying which version of the tag (if any) a track
contains.

        ID3 tags are high value for indexing.

--
Chris Pepper: <http://www.reppep.com/~pepper/>
                              <http://www.extrapepperoni.com/>
The Rockefeller University: <http://www.rockefeller.edu/>