Review: Google Desktop for the Mac works well—and it’s free
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 4, 2007 at 11:56am
Google Desktop for the Mac is a free application that gives you easy access to information on your Mac and from the web. It simplifies searching your email, files, music and applications. And, naturally, it gives you access to Google.
Google Desktop also includes support for Google Gadgets, interactive mini-applications that can be placed on your Mac’s dashboard. Google has made it very Mac friendly; you can add gadgets to Dashboard in one click. What’s more, with the Google Gadget application, you can find new gadgets by searching for a specific one or browsing through gadget categories. Once you’ve found the gadget you want, just mouse over it and click the “Add” button. Voila! The gadget will be added to your Mac’s Dashboard.
The application will have new gadgets every week. When you launch the application, Google Desktop will automatically check for new ones and pull them into the gadgets interface.
Google Desktoop lets you search your Gmail account (if you have one; I don’t) and web history since, as Google says, “not everything you’re looking for lives on your Mac.” Because your index is stored locally on your own computer, you can even access your Gmail and web history while you’re offline. That’s a very convenient feature.
How does it work? Google Desktop creates cached copies (snapshots) of your files and other items each time you view them, and stores these copies on your Mac’s hard drive. As a result, you can often use Desktop to find prior versions of your files or ones you’ve accidentally deleted, another nice touch. However, you can also configure Desktop to prevent deleted items from appearing in your Desktop search results. To do this, go to System Preferences > Google Desktop > Search Results and uncheck the “Display results for deleted documents” box.
Google Desktop requires Mac OS X 10.4+. It’s Universal Binary so runs natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. Google Desktop is also compatible with the Safari, Firefox and Camino browsers. You may also choose own features for Google Desktop for the Mac, and if you choose to install only one feature, such as Google Gadgets, search won’t be installed on your computer until you add it. The folks at Google say that they don’t see, or record, your Google Desktop results without your permission.
There are also other nice, security features. If you want to hide a particular set of Desktop results (e.g., if you’re projecting to an audience), click the Hide link. Your Desktop results won’t reappear until you do another web search.
To prevent Google Desktop results from appearing on your web results page, go to System Preferences > Google Desktop > Search Results and uncheck the “Enable Google.com integration” box.
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
