Glad to see Google bring back an official search bar to Windows after discontinuing Google Desktop in 2011. IIRC ctrl,ctrl was the shortcut to pop up that search bar.

Now if only Google would bring back the Google One Windows VPN client.

"to help you find what you need, faster" yeah, I know you care about me, google.

Aaaaaand it's shut down

> instantly search for information from ... of course, the web.

Why would I need random web garbage when searching my "computer files, installed apps, Google Drive files" (even apps don't fit, but at least that's a tiny set)

Maybe if can index my files as well, better than microsft

"Try it for yourself by opting into the experiment in Labs."

This is a really confusing call to action.

Install Google For Windows...

until Lucy pulls the football again.

How does Google expect anyone to trust them.

I absolutely loved the Google Windows search app, and even went as far as fighting for our org to install the google appliance, only for Google to pull the rug out from under us.

They have Exchange solutions working for over 2 decades but the Google Appliance barely lasted 5 years.

Press Alt+Space to activate? Nobody activate window menus from keyboard any more?

I get "Search Labs isn’t available for your account right now"

Seeing the Google Labs name brought back bad memories. Google had an amazing app called Google Talk. It was small, fast and you could chat from your computer to somebody's Gmail account. But then Google announced labs version of google talk. It was slow and broke local video playback. And then that was replaced with a crappy extension you had to run in their browser thus ending Googles short small useful app story.

Is it too cynical to assume that their goal is to get more data for their LLMs?

Please make it so downvotes (thumbs down) requires a double click. I don't want to send hurtful signals when I accidentally hit that.

Wasn't this done (20!) years ago? It seems very familiar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop#Results_list:_t...

it's hard to compete with other launchers like:

- Microsoft PowerToys Run https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

- Keypirinha https://github.com/Keypirinha/Keypirinha

- Flow Launcher https://github.com/Flow-Launcher/Flow.Launcher

If they can index google photos and gmail too then I might try.

Bet they're anticipating that at some point in the future they might want gemini to interface with your PC (ala Claude's "computer use" and openai's "operator")

Ok gave this a try. Actually pretty handy. I wish I didn't clean up my Windows PC so I could compare indexing of files, but it did a good job of finding most things but the things I searched for Windows was able to find too. But its nice to have an easy shortcut to Google search and also having Google Lens on my PC to translate text, ask questions about a screenshot etc. I love this feature on my android.

The UI is a little annoying at times. Some apps receive the alt+space key so it doesn't always behave like you expect.

Checking Task Manager it used about 43MB of memory whether running as a background process or in the foreground, showing search results.

Sorry Google, but Alt+Space is already used by Powertoys Run. At least have the decency to pick a combo that isn't already being used by your competition. So classless, but I suppose that's par for the course.

(I know the hotkey combo is customizable, but it's still offputting that they chose that one.)

I wonder how an LLM built with this Google app would do compared to one built with Recall data. Even though it might not get the same raw info as Recall I see it having more than enough to be competitive.

What about releasing the source of Android 16 QPR1 instead? Forgot about that one?

While I'm at it, let me mail my hard drives and birth certificate to the Google offices.

Highly recommend Everything instead. It's so freaking fast, can search by keywords, can sort by time change to see what files are being touched in real time, can search any "cloud" file if you have them locally ... And no ads!

https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/

… in other words, submit all of the data on your PC to Google to train their LLMs on.

Please consider making the UI respect the user's custom text scaling settings for accessibility. I'm not referring to DPI scaling but the TextScaleFactor value at HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Accessibility (see [1][2]) that users can set in Ease of Access > Display > Make text bigger.

(Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!)

With the exception of Chromium/Chrome [3] this's been a persistent issue with Windows desktop apps from Google (most of these also use hard-coded control sizes making the problem worse).

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/input/...

[2] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/uwp/api/windows.ui.viewman...

[3] https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40586200