desktop search (read beagle) vs web search (google)

Its been 5 months since I was introduced to beagle and started using it. And thanks to Joe, Jon, Daniel, Fredrik, Varadhan (and many others), beagle is quite mature now. They would say (and me too) home-use safe.

Hanging out in beagle irc channel and sometimes fiddling with the code has given me quite a good exposure of beagle internals. I liked it. With the C bindings (libbeagle) and python bindings (pybeagle), non-C# users can also create cool apps for beagle. I am waiting for somebody to write a kicker applet.

Anyway, I am recently feeling a bit separated from beagle. I was inclined towards beagle because I had to search something and I wasnt sure where to grep and what to locate. But for the last few months, I have hardly used beagle to find something in my computer. On the contrary, I use google probably 100 times a day or more. Why is it that searching in my files is so less infrequent than searching on the web ? It might be that its only me. A computer science research student doesnt need to find a lot of stuff (e.g. papers) among his own files. For him, a lot more is available on the web. So for me, I dont search a lot in my files not because I dont have the tool to search but because I dont have the data to search. Given that desktop-search is the new buzzword in the town, I just hope not many people are like me.

- d.

PS: Next in coming, more KDE support for beagle. Konqueror web-history indexing, Konqueror Bookmark indexing and (probably) thumbnail preview for best results in KDE!!! Stay tuned.