Google Desktop - Under the Hood

InsideGoogle has a very revealing expose of what is underneath the hood of Google Desktop. Nathan caught up with Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products, at Digital Life today and got an earful of interesting tidbits.



Here are some interesting parts of the article:

• Gmail users will have a bit of good news. Gmail users should be able to search Gmail in the next few weeks.
  
  
• While PageRank is not used in determining relevancy on desktop searches, Desktop does make use of nearly every other method of determining keyword relevance Google uses, from titles to bold text. 'The way queries are parsed is the same' Marissa said.
  
  
• The Google Desktop Index maxes out at two gigabytes. The data can't go above that ceiling, so don't worry about it taking over your hard drive.
  
  
• For now Desktop is only for one user on the computer. First come first serve, the others are plum out of luck. They are working on fixing this as soon as possible.
  
  
• It's likely Google will do a software bundle in the future, so users can download all Google products in a single installer.
  
  
• The reason that Hello is getting such low press coverage is that the Piccassa team doesn't think its ready for prime time.
  
  
• The codename 'Puffin' was the designation for the Deskbar, and that's been out for a while. Marissa wouldn't say what Desktop's code name was, but it sure wasn't 'Puffin'. (oops)

Source: InsideGoogle