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Loogle

Local Hard Disk Google
  (+3)
(+3)
  [vote for,
against]

Filenames... yeesh. What a silly system. We make people search for filenames when what they really want is the information contained therein.

Sure, Windows comes with the ability to search text files and such for text strings, but it takes forever, and God knows how I phrased what I wanted to say, and whether I spelled it correctly the first time around. Why can't the operating system be organized topically? Why do Windows folders have to leave as few clues as to their contents as manila envelopes in a dusty filing cabinet?

What I really need is a Local Disk Google engine, or Loogle, with the searching brainpower of its engine to Googlify everything locally on my PC.

I would sacrifice many burnt offerings to the search engine god who could program it.

RayfordSteele, Jun 26 2003

Google Search Appliance http://www.google.c...ppliance/index.html
Baked! [krelnik, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

WinFS http://www6.tomshar...20030617/index.html
[Cedar Park, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Some MS design work http://www.microsof...2003/06-27ciw_l.jpg
This represents a piece of UI design work that won the gold international 2003 IDEA award. Seems Bill knows how to push other's buttons as well. [bristolz, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]

foogle http://www.foogle.net/
sorry, couldn't help it [RobertKidney, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

PageRank http://www.google.com/technology/
Why Google works [cesium, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Deductus http://www.aolej.com/dedu/overview.html
Indexes 40 file types (but not OpenOffice, yet) [probert, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Queue: An interview with Jim Gray http://www.acmqueue...&pa=showpage&pid=43
10 July 2003 | Jim Gray is the head of Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center. This interview touches upon his thoughts about the future of storage. Interesting. The link to MSR's "MyLifeBits" is worth following as well. [bristolz]. [bristolz, Oct 05 2004, last modified Nov 05 2004]

Google mirror http://www.alltooflat.com/geeky/elgoog/
Very well done. [modular, Oct 05 2004, last modified Oct 17 2004]

Google Desktop http://desktop.google.com/
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Rayford - I think the Google boys are trying to flatter you. [energy guy, Nov 16 2004]

Liam R. E. Quin's Iq-text (Unix.) http://www.holoweb.net/~liam/lq-text/
[jutta, Jan 13 2007]

[link]






       Using Windows, how would this differ from *Start: Search: For Files or Folders*?
thumbwax, Jun 26 2003
  

       Because it would involve more than the filenames I guess. It could suggest spelling changes, search strings, etc.
RayfordSteele, Jun 26 2003
  

       If it's like Google it would also be nearly instantaneous. +
AO, Jun 26 2003
  

       instantaneous... right...
RayfordSteele, Jun 26 2003
  

       // How would this differ from *Start: Search: For Files or Folders*? //   

       Because this would automatically provide links to "Buy ________ at Amazon.com" and "Read reviews and opinions on ______ at www.epinions.com".
phundug, Jun 26 2003
  

       This is absolutely baked, by Google themselves. However, I think you will find it is more expensive than you might wish. See link.
krelnik, Jun 26 2003
  

       Wow. What a counter-intuitive organization system. I don't like the sound of that at all. I guess I'm just used to my Windows folders structure.   

       With this lack of hierarchy you wouldn't be able to browse the contents of a folder to decide which file you want; you'd just have to blindly ask for it. Weird.
snarfyguy, Jun 26 2003
  

       Folders are for bureaucrats "Sorry, Sir I can only find your file if you know the project ID and exact date and time when it was created. That's how we sort it here."   

       I keep my file structure flat and do a search. The Windows search could be improved and a Google like feature that puts likely hits to the top would be nice. Besides, Google is faster than hacking through that stupid Windows search dialog. (+)
kbecker, Jun 26 2003
  

       Windows Future Storage (WinFS) filing system will bring RayfordSteele's desires to light, sometime in late 2004 with Windows (codename Longhorn). [link]
Cedar Park, Jun 26 2003
  

       Looks like its real, who but Windows would use screen space as inefficiently as shown in that screenshot. Does the user really need the folder icon in that size? Does the message that nothing is selected have to be in a font three times the font of any useful information? -- Just ranting, but Bill just knows how to push my buttons.
kbecker, Jun 26 2003
  

       As Longhorn is still in Alpha stage, I imagine there is a massive amount of GUI still to be worked out.
Cedar Park, Jun 27 2003
  

       LINUX has this feature, I think the command is GREP maybe more widely known for the crooner ballad "don't you grep my root"
Trodden, Jun 27 2003
  

       Excellent idea! Windows has this feature, but it is slow and the phrase matching is primitive. Linux has "find / -type f -exec grep <phrase> {} /dev/null \;", which is also slow.   

       If someone had told me ten years ago that I would be able to search three billion files on 40 million computers in 0.33 seconds -- but that it would take five minutes to search my hard disk -- I would not have believed them!
esnible, Jun 28 2003
  

       What a great observation.
bristolz, Jun 28 2003
  

       In linux, isn't 'locate' a better tool since it uses an index of files created every night?   

       Or should I just play around with grep more? :)
rapid transit, Jun 28 2003
  

       esnible, the only reason you can search millions of computers quickly is that Google has thousands of computers and thousands of hard drives for their indices, and spends all day reindexing everything. It's easy to do a fast local search if you're willing to give up a large chunk of your disk and processor time to build the index.
hob, Jun 28 2003
  

       Yup, its the classic computer science trade off: storage versus speed.
krelnik, Jun 28 2003
  

       So, would this return a lot of loogies...?
DrCurry, Jun 28 2003
  

       I used to have AltaVista Personal on an older computer. It did exactly this and was absolutely superb. Sadly I lost it and it doesn't seem to be available any more.
7snottyorphans, Jun 28 2003
  

       *hock* ptooey!
snarfyguy, Jun 28 2003
  

       The whole reason that Google returns useful results is that it treats hyperlinks between websites as "votes" for how useful they are. If a site has many sites linking to it, Google assumes it is useful and puts it at the top of search results. Your computer's filesystem is not structured like this - files do not link to each other. The Google Search Appliance is useful if you have a large webpage repository where PageRank can be applied; other than that, it just indexes your files by converting everything to html.
cesium, Jun 29 2003
  

       Deductus, shareware $29, is a good, local disk/lan search engine.
probert, Jun 30 2003
  

       This shareware looks like what RayfordSteele is looking for: http://www.searchwithin.com/   

       It indexes text, HTML, PDF, MS Word, WordPerfect, and PowerPoint. $10, takes 30 minutes to build the index on a 20 GB hard disk.
esnible, Jul 04 2003
  

       Ava Find is like slocate for Windows. You get to search filenames for substrings, you can use the * wildcard, and the rankings are done sensibly.   

       It works well with the Explorer shell. Shift-Esc brings it up, and the results display is what you'd expect from part of Windows.   

       It doesn't eat up too much processor time making the index. Mine's 3-4mb, and it takes 10min to rebuild every four days. Ava Find monitors the FS for changes in between updates, and it apparently catches the ones that matter.   

       You can run it with most of the commercial features on for 30 days, then it's crippled down to a restricted version, which includes all I've mentioned except the between-updates filesystem monitoring. The commercial version can index network drives and do other miscellaneous tricks -- $20/year to subscribe to it.   

       It's conservatively designed and written -- not much in the interface or tons of code, but it does its job well -- the sort of thing young programmers should aspire to write. :) The company name is Think Less Do More Software Services.
jimmt, Dec 13 2003
  

       According to an article in the New York Times, Google is developing just what you described here under the code name "Puffin". It will be available as a free download from Google's web site sometime soon. (Link expired, so I removed it).
krelnik, May 19 2004
  

       <Wonders, typing aloud, if Puffin will work with Longhorn's Yukon/WinFS plans>
bristolz, May 19 2004
  

       That would be, what, Pukon?
DrCurry, May 19 2004
  

       It could be but if a lot of time and resource were used to combine the two into a googlified content-addressable scheme I would hope that some effort would be expended to coin a better name than that suggestion. Perhaps NameLabs or another product naming firm could start with Pukon and, from there, comb through other possibilities. Usually, final product names aren't the first suggestions that pop into people's heads.
bristolz, May 19 2004
  

       Love it! I need this now. Look under c:\Bun\croissants.exe for your rewards. (+)   

       If this gets baked, you get a whole bushel of buns.
energy guy, Aug 17 2004
  

       <blatant sarcasm>Is microsoft's search technology really so bad that you'd need an add-on to find certain files?</blatant sarcasm>   

       Bun.
shapu, Aug 17 2004
  

       MS WinFS isn't a search technology, it's a content addressable storage system.
bristolz, Aug 17 2004
  

       BAKED recently. Free in beta at google.com Works great!
-----, Nov 05 2004
  

       I tried to apply loogie and google together. I'm not sure why you need to google loogies or how, but the train of thought trying to figure it out was worth the calories. [+]
Voltmeter, Nov 05 2004
  

       This has been baked recently by the guys at google. I think one of them must frequent the bakery, cause you definitely thought of this one first. Rayford, I think you should call them & tell them they owe you for your idea.   

       Oh and yeah - here's a bushel of buns as promised!   

       ++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++
energy guy, Nov 16 2004
  

       Probably obvious for software types; not so much for laymen like me. I suppose what I was proposing would be a smart relational db topical index system thingy of some sort that keeps topics grouped together, by automatically cross-referencing them with probabilistic models of related files. If Google's usually able to pick out what I'm looking for by probabilistic methods and associations, then an operating system should be able to hook up to Google's brain, cross-reference my work for the usual suspects of related topics, then parse my drive for probable matches of other bits of my work, and then provide access to them in an organized fashion.
RayfordSteele, May 21 2005
  

       Thoroughly baked in Unices with "grep" and "locate". Sounds like you need a better OS if this is important to you.
disbomber, May 22 2005
  

       i believe my mac has this....spotlight. instantly find every file on your computer with a keyword
lolzcakes, May 23 2006
  

       But will it tell me how to get to the nearest toilet?
zen_tom, May 23 2006
  
      
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