More Efficient and Simple Document Searching
Simplify the process of searching documents with a useful and free tool, and do it efficiently.
Published Jun 5, 2007 by mjkunzLast updated on Jun 5, 2007
You can simplify your document searching with Google Desktop. Whether at work or at home the amounts of electronic documents we keep are piling up. As data storage gets cheaper and cheaper we keep more and more documents and other files and delete less. Searching through these documents for needed information can be time consuming and in-efficient if we don't have a clever way to do it. There are several tools out there to help us search our documents but most have a cost associated with them. The best option I've found is to use the free Google Desktop software?
This tool can be usufull to anyone no matter what you keep your documents for. 
If you are a software developer like me you know that you have piles and piles of documentation. Besides the personal documents you keep you have build documents, technical papers, end user manuals, design documents, test cases, and lets not forget our daily emails. The list can go on and on. It is difficult to just remember where everything is documented and even worse to have to search each document one by one to find the information you are looking for. This is where the Google Desktop tool comes in handy. The tool works by indexing the data on you computer and other locations that you specify to provide very fast searching. Your search results are displayed in the same form that Google's standard web search results display.
Once you install the tool use the preference page to setup what document types you want to index. You can choose from a wide variety of document types. From text files and emails to PDF and Power Point Presentations. There are also additional plug-ins you can download to allow indexing of additional items. Your local fixed drives are indexed by default but you can specify what drives and locations to index or not index if that is your preference. One large benefit available is the option to specify network locations that you want indexed. This is great if you have shared documentation stored on your network. Depending on the amount of data you have, building the initial index can take some time. The tool will start building the index immediately and work in the background to minimize processor usage. To keep your index clean of documents that have been deleted I would enable the option to remove deleted files from your index. As documents are created and updated the tool is constantly updating the index and that ensures that your searches will return up to date information.
As always there is the question of security. Even though a vulnerability in the tool was recently found Google has done a good job in making this tool safe and secure. There is even an option to encrypt the index file that Google creates. Of course this will slow down your search times but from what I've seen they don't slow down much. Beyond this there is one additional item you can do to ensure security and avoid online vulnerabilities. Don't enable the option to "search across computers". This option will enable information to be stored online by Google. I suggest that you keep the data local and leave that option disabled.
This tool has saved me lots of time that I would have normally wasted searching numerous documents one at a time. It's simple and efficient and that's what I like.
If you have any feedback, questions, ideas, or suggestions regarding this write-up please contact us and let us know. We are always working to improve mikekunz.com and we appreciate your feedback.
Save to del.icio.us! • 
Stumble It!
Subscribe to the mikekunz.com feed