15 October 2004

The other day we announced our patent policy. Someone pointed out that the headline should have been: Novell to use powers for good, not evil.

Played with Google’s desktop search tool. It is mind-blowingly fast. The interface is a web page running on a local web server, and I have never seen a web server return pages so quickly. This must be the secret sauce that runs Google’s web search, in a 400k download on your PC.

So, it is fast and it is cool, but Google shocked the world by releasing something highly imperfect. Besides the inherent suckiness of being proprietary, Google’s desktop search indexes a very narrow set of application data, very few file formats, its index is disk-intensive, slow to build, doesn’t back off of non-idle systems well, etc. And it only runs on Windows, with IE and Outlook.

Our theory is that this thing was rushed out the door. You might have noticed a flurry of search announcements recently: AOL, Google, Spotlight, heavy advertizing from blinkx. Everyone’s rushing to market on this thing because Microsoft plans to unveil their desktop search functionality — a scaled-back search-only tool, not full WinFS functionality — next month. And so people are scampering to get out of its way.

That’s our theory, but I doubt Google would ever admit to being the subject of market forces.

Posted on 15 October 2004