[wozniacki]

Google Desktop Search - even from a cursory glance at the comments in this thread and the absence of its mention - is by far the most under-appreciated Google product ever.

That sucker was good. Great even.

It would find things across browsers, through documents and files and even collate results from web searches that most browsers - sometimes even Chrome to this day - missed or never registered in the history, in the first place.

I would have gladly paid some $50-$75 a year to have it work across all of my devices.

And I don't typically pay for most offerings. It was that good.

I miss that one badly.

[frik]

Google desktop search was great. At the high of the desktop search engine race, it competed with OSX Spotlight and Windows desktop search (and various others like Yahoo X11, Copernic desktop search). Google worked on 3 major OS and run on a local web server. It looked like a local Google search and indexed various file formats incl. iFilter support.

As basically all companies stopped further developing desktop search products, I needed a proper replacement. I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

[smacktoward]

I developed an enterprise/desktop search engine last year that basically reimplements Google desktop search including advanced search syntax and support for various file formats.

If this were Reddit, this is the point where I would post the "SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY" image.

[smacktoward]

Yeah, me too. It seems like desktop search as a product sector just kind of fell out of favor one day -- one moment there were a bunch of products scrapping it out, the next they were all gone. I have no idea why, I found it desktop search incredibly useful and would also happily have paid for a good product. But no really good ones exist anymore.

The even more mind-boggling thing is that for Google especially, desktop search would seem to be a huge opportunity. Imagine how precisely you could target ads to users if they let you scan their entire hard drive! Jeez louise.