Back when the beta arrived, I wrote that Google Desktop Search is a disappointment because it didn’t support indexing Firefox history or Thunderbird mail. Later I praised its good points.

Now that the product has been released, I thought I should follow up. First off, the seem to have retained the good points. It remains a tiny download, even with added features; it is fast; and it doesn’t hog a lot of resources when it is idle, at least on my home desktop.

They also addressed my main gripe by adding support for indexing Firefox History and Thunderbird e-mail. And while they didn’t address my desire to index my blog, they did provide a Plugin SDK, which has allowed someone else to create a plugin called Kongulo that can index web sites which should meet that need.

One notable feature of their plugin SDK is that it can handle compound files and index each item as a separate record, for example, indexing each row in a spreadsheet or database separately. The desktop search products from Microsoft and Copernic also have APIs, but appearantly have to index the entire contents of a file as a single record.

Of course, now that I’ve got the full version, I note that it has other shortcomings. For one thing, its still a bit jarring to see items from my PC listed in the same page as a Google internet search. That I can get over (or turn off).

Harder to deal with is that GDS happily indexes the spam folders in my e-mail. I’d like to be to exclude mail folders easily, but according to their support, its currently not possible.

I’ve also noticed that when I tell GDS to open an e-mail from my search results in Thunderbird, it opens the wrong message.

The fact that the search interface is ordinary HTML also has some frustrations. It makes it difficult impossible to quickly resort and scan search results by other meta data like sender, recipient or date.

In any case, I’m hapy to see GDS supporting the browser and e-mail I use, and I look forward to Onfolio releasing a plugin so I can search my collection of web clippings at the same time I search e-mail and the like.

One Firefox extension I have no intention of uninstalling is SessionSaver. SessionSaver keeps track of the state of your browser — window positions, open URLs, scrolling positions, even tab-histories — and will restore them whenever you restart the browser, even if Firefox crashed. Next up is to install it on my wife’s computer — she keeps a lot of Firefox windows and tabs open, which really sucks for her every week or two when Firefox or an errant plugin finally freezes or blows up.

I just installed BetterSearch . BetterSearch is a firefox extension that enhances search results from Google, Amazon, A9, MSN, AllTheWeb and others with a thumbnail of each site and buttons and provides a button to open a preview of the linked item in-situ.

Both features can help you find the best result more quickly. Unfortunately, the thumbnail is usually of the top level of the site, so its not always an accurate clue about the contents of the page. Also, the link to bring up the in-situ preview is nearly microscopic, which means it takes more time to hit accurately, which both reduces its utility as a productivity tool, and adds frustration.

The thumbnail issue is not an easy one to fix since the extension is relying on 3rd partys for thumbnails. For the author to do it himself server-side would surely be cost prohibitive. The BetterSearch extension could download the pages and render the thumbnails itself, but this would probably be rather slow. It could come in handy though, if the downloaded page remained in the browsers cache, because people could then view the page that much quicker.

The difficulty in hitting the preview button is an easier fix, the author could just make the graphic for the button significantly wider.

In some ways what’s most interesting about BetterSearch is its business-model. The guy rewrites Amazon URLs to include his affiliate ID. Whether Amazon regards this as an activity in line with its terms of service is another matter.

At least all parties receive some benefit (amazon gets a sale, the customer has an easier time of finding things, and the plugin author gets paid). Browster has a similar product for IE, but it makes its money by selling ads on other people’s content and doesn’t cut them in, which is lame. Also lame, coming up with yet another “ster-name.”

I was a little worried that BetterSearch was loaded with spyware, but a little searching turned up nothing, though there is a similarly named piece of adware which seems entirely unrelated.

I applaud the effort to help move us past the same old search results we’ve seen since before AltaVista, but I think I’m going to un-install better search, at least until its easier to hit the preview links.