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Google Desktop Bloat July 5, 2006

Posted by Lucanos in : Uncategorized , 1 comment so far

I recently installed the Google Desktop application. Why not? I mean, Google revolutionised the searching of the internet, I’m sure they could do wonderful things to help me manage and search my computer.

Well, the searching is pretty funky - when you search for a string through the Google webpage it returns a page with results both from the web as well as from your own emails, chat histories and files on your PC. This is only generated locally (GD seems to include a built in webserver application which allows both search results to be shown as well as preferences to be changed).

The problem I had? The time and resources the darn thing used up.

It took about 3 days to index my laptop, which has an 80Gb hard drive, which is about 3/4 full. Then, I found out, after contacting Google, that the application has a massive footprint on your disk.

1 Gb for the application itself,
4 Gb for the index!

It’s a nice toy, but I am not surrendering 5Gb out of 80Gb just to make searching easier.

Uninstalled.