Google Desktop

» see desktop.google.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

i installed google desktop on a ttnet-connected windows xp machine around 2005 because google had just become a brand i trusted for everything, and the promise of local file search that actually worked was tempting. windows xp search was famously bad. typing a filename into the start menu in 2005 would chew on a spinning paperclip animation for two minutes and then return nothing useful.

google desktop was the answer. it built an index of every file on the disk, every gmail message, every chat log, every web page you had visited, and let you search across all of that from a single bar. it also added a sidebar to the right edge of the screen with gadgets, weather, a news ticker, an analog clock, a photo strip. vista shipped its own copy of this idea in 2007. windows 7 in 2009 finally fixed start menu search and made the original justification go away.

the death announcement came on september 14 2011, in a single blog post titled "fall spring clean" that also killed google maps api for flash, google fast flip, google notebook, and a few others. the reasoning was the standard one: "in the last few years there has been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing". google did not bother to migrate users to anything. the indexer just stopped getting updates. the sidebar stayed on screen until you uninstalled it.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it left ~

google desktop is a clean example of the 2004 to 2008 period when google still shipped client software for windows. google pack, the bundled installer for picasa, firefox, norton, adobe reader, and a dozen other utilities, died on the same day. so did google toolbar for firefox a few months later. by 2012 the google strategy was browser plus android, with no local-search story at all. that gap is still open. windows search is better than it was in 2005 but it is not better than google desktop was.

~ the funny part ~

the gadgets sidebar that google desktop popularized on windows is the same idea that microsoft killed inside windows 7 because of security concerns, then revived in windows 11 as the widgets panel anchored to the taskbar. the cycle is closed. the sidebar gadget is back. google is no longer the company shipping it.

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