Ted::Talks(): Web::Google Desktop good for email search

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When google desktop was first announced, being a big google fan back then, I immediately downloaded and tried it out. After spending about 30 minutes, I finally uninstalled it because:

I didn't need a sidebar other than my msn messenger
I didn't need another search widget other than the searchbox in my browser
I didn't feel that I need a search engine to look for my files
It used too much of my cpu time (or at least so it seemed)

After being disappointed at many of the new gadgets (video, base, etc.), I am no longer a big fan of google anymore, but I recently had an incentive to try out the google desktop once again. I currently use outlook for sending and receiving emails, but outlook is terrible when it comes to managing and searching for email messages. Since I get around 200 emails everyday, I can't really organize the messages in folders. So whenever I need to find a message that I've sent or received, I use outlook's 'Find' function. But I have almost 30K messages and it takes really long to get any result.

I rememberd that google desktop had an email search feature so I've decided to try it again. This time, I only enabled the email search feature. It took a while to index all the 30K messages, but once it was done, it worked like a charm.

When you install google desktop, a google searchbox appears on your windows toolbar. This searchbox lets you search not only the web but also your emails and local files. If you enter a search keyword and hit enter, it will bring up the browser with google search results. You can select the desktop search results by selecting it from the popup menu.

This screenshot shows the search result. It looks like any google search result, but if you look carefully, it is showing the pre-indexed email messages with helpful information : Title, Abstract, Sender, Threads and link to the email message. If you click on the title, it will show the email content within the browser, but you can click on the 'View in Outlook' link to bring up the message in outlook.

When you first install it, it takes a while to index the emails, but once that is done it works really well. This is truly a savior for anyone like me who receives a lot of emails and keeps a huge archive of old emails. I strongly recommend using it:)