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).
I'm split with this. If it helps other people, then I'm all for it. But speaking as someone who is legally blind and makes extensive use of these settings, Windows 10 accessibility drives me mad. I'm waiting for fractional scaling to improve for Linux so I can make the switch.
The problem with Make text bigger and Make everything bigger is they apply to every single application that supports them. Let's say I have two applications: A is comfortable enough to see and B isn't. If I change either of these settings to help me use B, A could now be a problem because it can take up too much screen real estate, which makes it unusable for a different reason.
This doesn't sound like much of a problem until you have 5 or more applications you're trying to balance via these two settings. In reality, it's more complex than I'm describing because I may need to change both settings to help with a new application, which then means I have to continuously test every other application I use to make sure they're all somewhat comfortable enough to use.
If an application I use updates to include support for these settings, I have to go through all this unplanned work again to try and make everything usable once more. It's frustrating.
I know people make fun of Electron, but one major plus point for me is I have per application scaling when using it, and so it gives me better accessibility than Windows does by far.
> (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!)
Try Fedora with KDE. It has fractional scaling, per display.
I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc.
I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.
Ideally, applications should use the Windows settings by default, but allow configuring a different scaling. Even more ideally, Windows should allow per-application settings, but until it does it’s the applications’ job.
What are your thoughts on screen magnifiers? Personally I tend to increase scaling a bit and use Magnifier for anything that's too small (or increase the font size in the application if possible)
Suspect this is another surface they want to play around with as a gateway into an AI/ChatGPT like experience.
Google have wanted to get people out of the web and into an app for a long time and have mostly failed because traditional search is so tied to the open web.
AI Search is a lot less tied to the open web (for better or worse) and so apps make a lot more sense.
I've seen more search labs in the last 24 months than probably the full decade before that.
Not sure if there's actually been that many more search labs out of Google, but there's certainly been a lot more worth talking about. Impressive to see to be honest.
A ton of the early discourse about ChatGPT was as an outright Google killer. It mostly hasn't really panned out that way; there's some overlap but the web ain't dead yet. If nothing else, search is a necessary input to the machine.
Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.
Google Desktop was mainly for local file search. Shame that the idea never really took off, and even today local search is hopelessly broken on both Windows and Mac.
It did take off. There were server pizza boxes and everything. It was killed in 2011 by the very same company that is now introducing it as a "new app" in 2025.
The dead Internet theory continues to prevail. What is old is new again because nothing new can be created. The Hollywood reboots formula works, so we continue it with technology reboots.
For Windows, Powertoys Run is great, but nothing beats Voidtools Everything for file search. It's an amazing piece of software that has retained the number one spot on Google search for the single term "everything" for an amazingly long time.
If memory serves me right, it could look for information in Word documents and instant messaging apps extremely quickly and then display results in a great UI similar to google.com. Nothing before or after ever matched its capability. A real shame the product was killed. I guess there was no money to be made there.
No way. Google's, "Don't catalog or organize anything, just throw it into a bucket and our Search™ will find it for you," ethos has been catastrophic for the web. I don't want it anywhere my personal files (any more than it already is through Drive et al.). Bad search is bad, but if you expect it, you can plan for it. If you're convinced that search is all you need, and then search fails, you're screwed.
I use FileLocator Pro on Windows, and a fairly organized hierarchical structure for all my files (that lives outside of the My Documents crap).
It doesn't need indexing - it makes use of very performant MFT querying to speed things up (and can of course search contents as well). Not quite instant unfortunately, but on modern hardware it's not too bad. I tried Everything and other index-based technologies but was never quite satisfied. I do really miss LookOut for email, that's one of the best search experiences I ever knew.
Yes, I had the first version and loved it. Back then searching for local files took forever. I was upset when it was discontinued. Even today on a high spec Windows 11 Pro machine search isn't as good as what it was with Google Desktop back then.
This was done to make Google the default search engine of your browser most likely Internet Explorer. They then pushed Firefox and then created Chrome. Now they have to be sure that your default search engine is Google.
No, 2005 was peak 'Don't be Evil'. It really was a different time. They made Desktop simply because it fixed search. Being in the default browser was a nice side effect.
You might be confusing this with Google Toolbar. It didn't change your search engine, because searching in the URL bar didn't even exist yet. Search engine competition wasn't really a zero-sum game back then, because users would often install multiple toolbars for different purposes (or more likely, have them installed automatically by crapware). But nevertheless it did cement Google's market dominance.
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!
I'm a big fan of Everything (and recently donated to the developer). I tried this Google app and was pleased to see that it seems just as fast as Everything for local file search. Presumably they use the same underlying mechanism for searching files (something about hooking into the NTFS index). I might give it a shot.
(disclaimer: I work at Google, but nothing related to this app)
Was gonna say I use Command Palette for this same thing and it's so damn good. It's free, well integrated to Windows and just amazing. Reminds me of Alfred on macOS.
AFAIK it's not really possible to implement Everything in Linux because Everything relies on reading the entire file list at once from the NTFS metadata, allowing it to index at incredible speed. On Linux, there are dozens of filesystems which likely make it impossible to achieve the same.
That said, I do wonder why Linux gone search is always so slow even on indexed files.
With anything Google you have to worry about privacy. Where is the privacy policy? Does it associate information it finds on your PC to your Google identity?
I don't find this particularly egregious - Google has long required ALL apps on the Android store to provide a privacy policy, even if they collect no data whatsoever.
A privacy policy can help confirm the absence of data collection as much as it can also be used to explain how collected data (if any) is used. If anything it's a helpful change, as it provides a standardized way for apps to confirm they collect no data.
Any app submitted to the iOS store has the same requirement to provide a privacy policy too, and again even if no data is collected.
I can't find any privacy policy at all. There's a bullet point on the page about "search history" but nothing that I can comprehensively analyze. It can search my files so without any additional information I have to assume any/all contents of my documents might be sent to google for more efficient indexing.
General note for app developers: Try to think of the worst, most sociopathic things you could do with your app's level of access. Then reassure your customers by using your privacy policy to create a legal obligation never to do the things which would enable the ability to do those things.
If you don't tell me you're not doing it (in a way that I can clearly sue you if you do), I have to assume that you are doing the absolute worst things your app is technically capable of doing with the data it has access to. That's just the way the world works these days.
>It can search my files so without any additional information I have to assume any/all contents of my documents might be sent to google for more efficient indexing.
Or even AI training, your companies secret sauce recipe might be regurgitated on demand for your competitors.
Absolutely not. This is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone.
I'm sure everyone already understands this, but just to be clear:
There is NEVER, just NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, going to be a SINGLE QUERY that you want to search BOTH your local files AND the web for. If you want to search the web, you open the web browser. If you want to search your local files, you want privacy which means you don't want the query going to the online search engine. It's a catastrophic privacy risk to put both things in the same box just for the convenience to not have to open the web browser, which is completely pointless either way because you're going to have the browser later anyway if you want a web result.
I'm convinced that Microsoft, Google and (once) Canonical do this fully knowing that some people don't take their own privacy seriously with computer devices or lack the understanding to do so, and when they start letting these things happen and accepting these intrusions, it becomes normalized and suddenly nobody has any privacy left. In the future all your local files will be posted to web servers automatically all the time without consent because that's just what will be the "normal" and accepted pattern by then. This already happens with OneDrive. People get their files sent to Microsoft all the time having no idea it is happening. Google Drive is the same for mobile. People use the "cloud" barely understanding that their data is in someone else's computer, and in many cases without even being aware that they are using the cloud in first place.
The worst of all is that even if you wanted this, in 5 years it's probably going to be "sunsetted" anyway since it's Google.
> This is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone.
Windows itself is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone. I try to avoid google and windows because of privacy issues already, but even without them I'm afraid it's only going to get harder to own a computer that does work for you without also being used against you by somebody else.
If you have the top market position already in browsers and search, pretty easy to get people onto a product like this regardless of whether better alternatives exist.
Those have traditionally been for "power" users. Google is targeting "average" users with this, I believe. And if so, I also believe this will have more installs than any (all?) of those within a year.
Nice to see, though I gave up on Windows a short a while ago for Linux and KDE's Krunner is seriously awesome; even used it to do some trigonometry the other day!
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.
Readit News
(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
The problem with Make text bigger and Make everything bigger is they apply to every single application that supports them. Let's say I have two applications: A is comfortable enough to see and B isn't. If I change either of these settings to help me use B, A could now be a problem because it can take up too much screen real estate, which makes it unusable for a different reason.
This doesn't sound like much of a problem until you have 5 or more applications you're trying to balance via these two settings. In reality, it's more complex than I'm describing because I may need to change both settings to help with a new application, which then means I have to continuously test every other application I use to make sure they're all somewhat comfortable enough to use.
If an application I use updates to include support for these settings, I have to go through all this unplanned work again to try and make everything usable once more. It's frustrating.
I know people make fun of Electron, but one major plus point for me is I have per application scaling when using it, and so it gives me better accessibility than Windows does by far.
> (Failing that, adding basic support for scaling text or UI via ctrl+plus/minus would be a huge improvement!)
I'd consider this to be a better option.
I set my laptop (1920x1080) to 120%, effectively making it 1600x900 but with very good physical size of things. I set my external panel (2560x1440) to 160%, effectively making it 1600x900 also. KDE even visualizes the two panels to be the same size. Ontop of these basic DPI settings, you can then tweak font/text even further. Its quite amazing. Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
If you do go down the fractional scaling rabit hole, make sure whatever values you pick, both the height and width ends without any fractions after applying your custom dpi... that elimnates all blurs. In my example above, 2560/1.6 and 1440/1.6 gives nice round numbers, even though the operating systems typically only offer 100/125/150/175/200 etc.
I built a small console app for myself that takes the resolution and tests all increments of 1% to see which resolution combinations gives values that don't end with fractions at the end. So it tells me which effective resolutions I will get at which % settings. Its awesome and made it so that I can easily make so that my laptop and external display has the same amount of space (or line of code) on the screen, even though they are different physical sizes.
Google have wanted to get people out of the web and into an app for a long time and have mostly failed because traditional search is so tied to the open web.
AI Search is a lot less tied to the open web (for better or worse) and so apps make a lot more sense.
Not sure if there's actually been that many more search labs out of Google, but there's certainly been a lot more worth talking about. Impressive to see to be honest.
Still, nice that Google has woken up, even if the search result quality hasn't improved much.
Why do you say that? And, why do they botch their own cash cow - AdWords?
https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop#Results_list:_t...
https://www.ebay.com/itm/283722910233
https://web.archive.org/web/20060112110931/https://desktop.g...
The dead Internet theory continues to prevail. What is old is new again because nothing new can be created. The Hollywood reboots formula works, so we continue it with technology reboots.
Fool me once, ...
I use FileLocator Pro on Windows, and a fairly organized hierarchical structure for all my files (that lives outside of the My Documents crap).
It doesn't need indexing - it makes use of very performant MFT querying to speed things up (and can of course search contents as well). Not quite instant unfortunately, but on modern hardware it's not too bad. I tried Everything and other index-based technologies but was never quite satisfied. I do really miss LookOut for email, that's one of the best search experiences I ever knew.
Not to derail this Windows thread, but is there anything that works remotely well on Mac? The built-in options are ... lacking
https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
(disclaimer: I work at Google, but nothing related to this app)
But Google App is more than a search bar for filesystem, it's like Perplexity
That said, I do wonder why Linux gone search is always so slow even on indexed files.
A privacy policy can help confirm the absence of data collection as much as it can also be used to explain how collected data (if any) is used. If anything it's a helpful change, as it provides a standardized way for apps to confirm they collect no data.
Any app submitted to the iOS store has the same requirement to provide a privacy policy too, and again even if no data is collected.
General note for app developers: Try to think of the worst, most sociopathic things you could do with your app's level of access. Then reassure your customers by using your privacy policy to create a legal obligation never to do the things which would enable the ability to do those things.
If you don't tell me you're not doing it (in a way that I can clearly sue you if you do), I have to assume that you are doing the absolute worst things your app is technically capable of doing with the data it has access to. That's just the way the world works these days.
Or even AI training, your companies secret sauce recipe might be regurgitated on demand for your competitors.
Absolutely not. This is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone.
I'm sure everyone already understands this, but just to be clear:
There is NEVER, just NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, going to be a SINGLE QUERY that you want to search BOTH your local files AND the web for. If you want to search the web, you open the web browser. If you want to search your local files, you want privacy which means you don't want the query going to the online search engine. It's a catastrophic privacy risk to put both things in the same box just for the convenience to not have to open the web browser, which is completely pointless either way because you're going to have the browser later anyway if you want a web result.
I'm convinced that Microsoft, Google and (once) Canonical do this fully knowing that some people don't take their own privacy seriously with computer devices or lack the understanding to do so, and when they start letting these things happen and accepting these intrusions, it becomes normalized and suddenly nobody has any privacy left. In the future all your local files will be posted to web servers automatically all the time without consent because that's just what will be the "normal" and accepted pattern by then. This already happens with OneDrive. People get their files sent to Microsoft all the time having no idea it is happening. Google Drive is the same for mobile. People use the "cloud" barely understanding that their data is in someone else's computer, and in many cases without even being aware that they are using the cloud in first place.
The worst of all is that even if you wanted this, in 5 years it's probably going to be "sunsetted" anyway since it's Google.
Windows itself is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone. I try to avoid google and windows because of privacy issues already, but even without them I'm afraid it's only going to get harder to own a computer that does work for you without also being used against you by somebody else.
- 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.
Nice to see, though I gave up on Windows a short a while ago for Linux and KDE's Krunner is seriously awesome; even used it to do some trigonometry the other day!
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.