Today Google released a new search tool that will search your personal files: emails, documents, chat transcripts and so on. The next version of windows, codenamed Longhorn and planned for 2006, was going to be based on a powerful new search-centric file system, but gave up on it – looks like Google is happy to fill the spot. The software’s only available for Windows right now. And, obviously aware of privacy concerns about gmail, Google promises that none of the data on your computer will ever get to Google central. Update: John Battelle has an extensive piece about this, including an interview with a Google representative. A cool thing is that the desktop search will also search every website that you’ve ever looked at, using your browser’s logs and cache. It only works on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for now. Hm.
5 thoughts on “google searches your harddrive”
Leave A Comment Cancel reply
Recommended Posts
Having your own words processed and restated can help you improve your thinking and your writing. That’s one reason why talking with someone about your ideas can help you clarify your thoughts. ChatGPT is certainly no replacement for a knowledgable friend or colleague, […]
Like the rest of the internet, I’ve been playing with ChatGPT, the new AI chatbot released by OpenAI, and I’ve been fascinated by how much it does well and how it still gets a lot wrong. ChatGPT is a foundation model, that […]
A few weeks ago Meta released Galactica, a language model that generates scientific papers based on a prompt you type in. They put it online and invited people to try it out, but had to remove it after just three days after […]
This spring when I was learning R, I came across a paper by Anders Kristian Munk, Asger Gehrt Olesen and Mathieu Jacomy about using machine learning in anthropology – not to classify big data, as machine learning is often used, but to […]
I’m co-organising a preconfernece workshop for AoIR2022 in Dublin today with Annette Markham and MaryElizabeth Luka today, and I’m going to show a few of the ways I’ve engaged with new digital platforms and genres over the years. This is a key […]
I’m (virtually) attending Elisa Serifinalli’s conference Drones in Society: New Visual Aesthetics today, and will be presenting work-in-progress exploring how drones are presented in the 500 novels, movies, artworks, games and other stories that we have analysed in the Database of Machine […]
Ian Bogost
Mac users, rejoice: http://quicksilver.blacktree.com. Changed the way I use my computer.
Jill
I installed that a few weeks ago and have been trying to use it but obviously haven’t quite cracked the codes – or else my brain works differently or something. So far it doesn’t seem a lot easier than the standard interface.
What, specifically, do you like about it, Ian?
bicyclemark
Eww.. hooray for google invading the little privacey I value.
trond
“Eww.. hooray for google invading the little privacey I value.”
Then don’t use it. It’s not mandatory to download and use every piece of software in the world 😉
:)
Hi. Apple wil have this in ther next versjon that wil come next year 🙂 http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/spotlight.html