Google Desktop Search: Perfection

I think I've decided that the Google Desktop Search application is amazing and wonderful and everyone should be using it.

Basically, I can do a normal Google search in my web browser, and I get results that exist on my disk. The nice thing about this is that the Google Desktop Search is much smarter than the standard Windows search feature and performs its task much faster. I set a Windows search for a certain file I couldn't quite remember the full filename of last night, and I set about a similar search in Google Desktop.

I had a rough idea that the file was under C:\Downloads, so I gave Windows that as a starting point. "Search C:\Downloads and subfolders for a file matching 'fraggle*.jpg'" I asked it. Google Desktop works differently, so I just asked it to find 'fraggle filetype:jpg'. This is not an identical search on both systems, but indicative of how each system behaves given a comparable request.

In a fraction of a second, Google had found several files matching my query, and the strip I was looking for was on the first page of results. Meanwhile, the Windows search kept chugging in the background. I left it to run. The next day, I discovered that the Windows search had returned zero results because I had not specified '*fraggle*.jpg' and the filename in question did not begin with the literal sequence 'f', 'r', 'a', 'g', 'g', 'l', 'e'. Without Google Desktop, I would have realized this error and then performed a second search for '*fraggle*.jpg'. Keep in mind that these are whole seconds of my life that I'm never going to get back looking for a damn Fraggle cartoon.

And for the curious, it wasn't actually a Fraggle cartoon. I don't think such a thing exists. I was just using it as an example. So don't mail me and ask about it.