{"id":1358,"date":"2004-10-14T20:15:23","date_gmt":"2004-10-15T00:15:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1358"},"modified":"2004-10-14T20:15:23","modified_gmt":"2004-10-15T00:15:23","slug":"not-evil-not-good-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=1358","title":{"rendered":"Not evil not good enough"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google desktop search<\/a> is obviously wonderful. “Google for the hard disk” is something one has wanted for years. But it’s not wonderful enough to get me using IE, <\/span>which is the only browser it works with at present. I’m rather shocked by that. You’d have thought that riffling through the cache of a web browser was something that would work with any browser’s cache, not just IE’<\/span>s.<\/p>\n\n

Anyone who uses OOo is used to the fact that disk indexers generally ignore it, so I’m not offended that Google does. In any case, I have just discovered Docsearcher,<\/a> which indexes OOo (and PDF, <\/span>and MS Office, HTML <\/span>and plaiin text) just fine. It’s free, open-source (Java, Lucence and stuff); it’s fast and not too fiddly to set up.<\/p>\n\n

So there is nothing that the Google desktop offers I can’t already kludge. I don’t have docsearch index my Opera cache, but that’s because I only just thought of it. Of course it’s uglier and less convenient in some ways, but using Internet Explorer and\/or Outlook condemns you to greater ugliness and inconvenience still.<\/p>\n\n

The next question is how far back does one want the browser history indexed? I could copy the cache automatically to an indexable disk every evening. But how soon would that disk run out? And how many duplicates would I get? Deep dark matters.<\/p>\n\n

In the meantime, I try to imagine what features Google could offer to make it worth my while to use IE and Outlook. The best I can come up with is a helper bar for online Poker rooms that would show the content of everyone else’s hand. This must be easier if all the other players are using IE.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Google desktop search is obviously wonderful. “Google for the hard disk” is something one has wanted for years. But it’s not wonderful enough to get me using IE, <\/span>which is the only browser it works with at present. I’m rather … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}