Integrating with google desktop?

[vamp07]

Now that GDS has an sdk, any chance of getting a version of UR that integrates it's data into the GDS search mechanism?

[kinook]

It appears two integration options are provided with the Google Desktop SDK:
1) allow a file type to be indexed (when created or when Google Desktop periodically reindexes) This would be quite inefficient (and ineffective in my opinion)
2) integrate Google Desktop searches inside of a different application (You can already create a link to the Google Desktop url so this integration is essentially available already to Ultra Recall)

Neither of these seem like very likely candidates for Ultra Recall. If you have a specific usage example or scenario where integration would provide tangible benefits, please elaborate...

[vamp07]

I think integration with GDS makes lots of sense. GDS or any of the looks like this gives us one central place to look for something when we don't know where it is stored. The advantage to GDS so far is that they have given tools like UR a way to integrate their own data storing format into their scheme.

Based on what you said about #1 then I assume you don't think having a central index of all your data is worthwhile? It's only worthwhile if we use UR for everything we are ever going to want to find?

It feel silly giving a usage example because it has nothing to do with UR. It gets to the point of why these tools exist to begin with.

Example: I need to find data X and I have no idea where I put it or what other stuff I have out there related to X. I want to go to one place to find it regardless of where it is stored.

I don't think #2 is worth the efforts.

Steve

[acant05]

I agree that integration with a desktop search tool would be a real plus. Idea! integrates seamlessly with the Windows indexing service, allowing results to be linked selectively into the database. Any possibility of this happening?

A UR Newbie
Al Cantley

[kinook]

Idea! integrates seamlessly with the Windows indexing service, allowing results to be linked selectively into the database

It sounds like you're describing option #2 above rather than #1. You should already be able to drag/drop, copy/paste, or send to UR from most desktop search apps. #1 is on our list for a future release.

[reesd]

Originally posted by kinook
It appears two integration options are provided with the Google Desktop SDK:
1) allow a file type to be indexed (when created or when Google Desktop periodically reindexes) This would be quite inefficient (and ineffective in my opinion)


My (limited) understanding of the IFilter API (which almost all the Desktop Search engine use) is that you can define UR as as "database-like store" that has multiple objects in it - like outlook is one big file that has lots of search items in it. Interesting it seems on the surface that you could describe UR as a store, but then hand the filtering back to the appropriate filters for what you store (text, word, pdf, html, etc). More information is here:
http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx#Hierarchical

I'll add that the first step to doing this is valuable in itself, which is defining a UR "protocol" so we can have UR URLs to UR documents. I talk about that at
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1902. The same MS documentation talks a bit about how to do that at:
http://addins.msn.com/devguide.aspx#URLsandItems

Thanks,

d

[dmt]

The same idea has occurred to me.