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.
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
This is wrong. Windows supports per monitor DPI since Windows 8 and have an improved API since Windows 10. I find it the only good implementation among desktop OSes. It is the only one that guarantees that font renders align with the pixel grid.
Many old apps do not support this API though. It is opt-in and while there is a hybrid mode to let Windows scale fonts and Win32 components via API hooks, without implementing DPI change callback most apps turn into blurry mess.
Usually browsers have the gold standard implementation of those callbacks hence why Electron is used everywhere.
Brother I'm looking right at it. I cannot set one monitor to 120% and another to 160% (both are custom values), like on KDE. If I use a custom setting it gets applied to both monitors, in fact it gets grayed out for some reason - the values don't even show properly. Only a reset button available that logs you out to reset it to 100%.
If I want to set them to different scaling factors, I have to use one of the values from the drop downs (100/125/150/175/200%), which is not what I want.
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
Here are all of my monitors at different DPIs: https://imgur.com/a/q3z2P1E . They don't have a "single DPI" that gets applied to all of them. The custom DPI setting is for changing all base system DPI.
> I cannot set one monitor to 120% and another to 160% (both are custom values), like on KDE.
Okay you're unhappy with the granularity. Yes Windows uses 25% granularity.
I don't know if this will work but you can probably do a combination of changing the base DPI and then calculating the 25%. So you can set the base DPI to something like 120 (which is 125%) and then set the other monitor to 125% which gives 156%:
I think the base DPI is stored in this registry key:
Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to.
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
As a word of warning, it is still not 100% perfect. I've noticed that on my laptop, when the Zed editor is maximized, there is a tiny gap between it and the panel at the bottom. I think this happens when an app, even if it supports fractional scaling in general, can't handle a logical window size that is not a whole number. To be fair, this is one of the only apps I've really had any scaling issues with lately, and it is just a minor visual annoyance. The Linux DPI scaling story is finally pretty solid.
Also, many apps (including Electron/Chromium apps) will still run under XWayland when using a Wayland session by default, because there are still a handful of small issues and omissions in their Wayland drivers. (It's pretty minor for Electron/Chromium so you can opt to force it to use native Wayland if you want.) In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.
Thats why you need to calculate which "eventual resolutions" divides down to values without fractions after your scaling has been applied.
So if you take a 2560x1440 panel, 160%/1.6 scaling factor will give you 1600x900, hence there won't be any artifacts. Between 100% and 200% there are maybe 5 combinations that will give you clean resolutions.
As an example:
Enter monitor Width (1920):
Enter monitor Height (1080):
1920x1080 at 100%
1600x900 at 120%
1536x864 at 125%
1280x720 at 150%
1200x675 at 160%
960x540 at 200%
800x450 at 240%
768x432 at 250%
640x360 at 300%
Aything besides these value WILL give you artifacts at some level.
> In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.
I'm wondering if this was the problem I was running into before – it sounds eerily familiar. I never got far enough to explore individual apps outside of preinstalled ones because I couldn't get comfortable enough. I appreciate your response as I wasn't aware of the different session types.
Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling.
In both X11 and Wayland, you should usually see most applications following your scaling preferences nowadays. In Wayland sessions, you can ensure that applications always appear at the correct size, though at the cost of "legacy" applications appearing blurry. This behavior is configured in the Display Settings in KDE Plasma.
Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
> Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling.
Presumably this leads to a more unified scaling experience. This was one thing I was concerned about before, as it didn't seem that way. That's a solid improvement on its own.
> Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
This is useful yes, along with the rest of your comments. Thanks for your help.
So Gnome does support it, but it is terrible. Last I tried it, it also applied the custom scaling value to all the displays like Windows. KDE does it perfectly.
Curious about GNOME fractal scaling issues you experience.
I currently have the experimental feature enable at 150% scale for a laptop screen at 2560x1600 resolution. Have not had any issues by itself nor with an external 3440x1400 at 100% scale with GNOME 48.
I wish I could give you a better answer here, but I honestly don't remember. I only remember that something I needed was missing from it for me to make the switch.
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.
Part of my wonders if this is what Microsoft hoped would happen when they implemented the settings in the manner they did. But it hasn't played out that way.
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)
I try to avoid using them. If I can, I prefer to configure my environment to not need them, but that does take a fair amount of work. I get by because of my technical knowledge. I don't know how other people cope.
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.
I can't be the only one that will reach for ChatGPT first over Google for most of my search needs. Stuff like looking for recipes, guides on how to do certain things. From a user perspective, ChatGPT is 100% a Google killer. Search engines may still be powering the AI (for now), but if we aren't exposed to their ads, that's a losing proposition for the incumbants.
It's more of a second order effect, once you train people to turn to your app for something instead of the open web you can then steer them towards more owned and operated experiences within that app instead of leaving.
Meta is the perfect example of this. In browser newsfeeds have the same ad load as the app but by steering everyone into an app and then controlling the experience there they make a shit ton more money.
They could frame the in-app content in ads. They wouldn't be able to do that using iframes on the web. (I guess in theory if they ... exploit Chrome then they could put ads there too).
I suppose they technically could overlay more ads, but they've already had mobile apps, Chrome and Chrome OS for decades and have never gone that far for obvious reasons.
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.
Right. The box wasn't necessary to search, but was an indicator of Google Desktop's success. Furthermore, we can still leverage the dead binary with just a little system hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ieNv7oelk
There was an Enterprise version of the Desktop app that connected to the Google Search Appliance (yellow pizzabox) or Google Mini (blue pizzabox, not Google Home Mini) as well as searching Windows/Mac local/shared drives https://web.archive.org/web/20070302151851/https://desktop.g...
I’m not the OP but I see the connection as Google seeking growth and revenue by applying their general search know-how to areas outside of the Internet.
I followed search appliance closely when they announced it. It was interesting technically and looked cool, but seemed like a dead end similar to desktop as applications were largely moving off of racks/desktops. I was right about that, but I expected Google to offer a web-based search appliance and they never did beyond custom searches. Algolia fills that opportunity nicely now.
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.
It was a time when federated and unified views were considered the optimal user experience and there were many flavors of the concept at the time (msft had search providers that would let you service any kind of result in windows or sharepoint search). However, 'brand awareness' started to take over. Nobody wanted to be just a provide to an obviously google-ish experience because it makes them easier to replace.
Like with messaging apps, everything fractioned to fall to a zero sum game of exclusive 'experiences'.
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.
The problem is the search ranking. It often ranks file names with partial matches higher than file names with full exact matches, and this frustrates me endlessly. For example I have a folder called "Home" containing documents like receipts for home improvement projects, manuals for appliances, mortgage statements from banks, etc. Searching for "Home" preferentially brings up random other files that has "home" in their names but this folder is ranked low. I have not found any way to adjust Spotlight's ranking heuristic.
Yeah, I have similar problems all the time and its heuristic is really strange. Like, it’ll emphasize a file called ._home_env_vars.sh buried in an old Python environment that hasn’t been accessed in 8 years over one just called “home” that I search for and open three times a week.
The other big thing that’s frustrating is it’s never clear to me when it’s done searching and when it still has more results to find.
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.
Potentially it was a different time. Google did hire Eric Schmidt whose previous company Novell was destroyed by Microsoft. Some say that NT stood for Novell or NetWare terminator.
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 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.
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.
This feels like a departure from Google’s usual approach. On desktop, Google has historically pushed everything into the browser, especially Chrome where they enjoy massive market share. Aside from some experiments in the 2000s like Google Desktop, they have not really released native Windows apps in the past decade.
Mobile is different, Google has plenty of native apps on Android and iOS. But on desktop almost everything has been browser based such as YouTube, Gmail or Docs. Personally, I would love to see something like a native YouTube Music app similar to Spotify instead of being locked into a browser tab.
I think part of this shift comes from the pressure of modern native apps like ChatGPT’s desktop client. With a quick shortcut like Alt+Space you instantly open a search/chat box, that kind of OS level integration is not possible with a browser or even with PWAs.
So while this might look like a small product announcement, I see it as a bit of a paradigm change for Google.
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.
But since then most cases have been nothing more than slaps on the wrist? Have any major companies faced dire consequences for their anticompetitive practice.
So why would they stop using their market position in ways that benefit them and at worst result in minor fines or wrist slaps?
Are you sure they lost? If the CEOs had perfect crystal balls and knew that those particular business practices would result in the penalties that they got in their court cases, I bet they still would have done the same things.
Not that I am an expert in each case, but as part of the evidence was that people in leadership/decision making positions were informed that their practices and conduct was unlawful.
> Are you sure they lost?
Well, Chrome and not Microsoft's browser is the dominant webbrowser, and at the heart of MSFT's anti trust case was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. So, yes. MS did lose.
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!
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.
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.
Doesn't everyone and everything have a chance of getting yanked? If this really makes your life better (assuming it does) for two years and then ends, didn't it give you two good years?
It's because ChatGPT uses the same shortcut and Google is afraid to lose even more market share to it so they now use the same shortcut and the search bar is obviously designed after the ChatGPT desktop program.
I looked up some screenshots of the ChatGPT desktop program, it doesn't look anything like the screenshot in this post unless there's some other search mode that nobody's taken a screenshot of. I think it's more likely that Google copied both the UI look and the shortcut from Apple Spotlight, which you activate with Cmd+Space (Alt+Space on a PC layout keyboard).
The ChatGPT app has two window modes: A full experience that looks like the website, and the "quick input" that looks like this Google Bar, which comes up with aforementioned keyboard shortcut.
Many people don't know how to cut and paste via the keyboard. The vast majority aren't even aware of Alt+Space. The only reason I use Alt+Space is to recover windows from off-screen areas.
I'm blind and alt+space is sometimes the best way to access select/copy/paste on the terminal. some other apps that have terrible a11y experience as well, but usually I use it there to closethe app asap.
Is the terminal you're referring to within, outside, or both within and outside a windowing system? How does it work? I'm not able to find an instance where alt+space does anything related to select/copy/paste.
Since the window menu actions that aren’t terrible with keyboard also have their own direct keyboard shortcuts (move and size are the ones that don’t, but hand positioning windows instead of using snap positions is tedious with keyboard), I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a fairly rare thing.
I was thinking about Maximise, Restore, and Minimise, which I think were Alt+Space {X,R?,N} (haven’t used Windows for a few years), but I suppose Win+Up is now Maximise, and Win+Down Restore and Minimise—but you still need Alt+Space N to minimise from maximised.
The design methodology goes way back. If you're in the Bay Area go to the Computer History Museum and inquire with a Mr. Ted Nelson. People have been singing this gospel for years and now that, "everyone's shit out of ideas" suddenly the Bigs get wise to, "humane UI patterns?" I don't buy it. Specifically summoning a text prompt with a UI short-hand is copyrightable; especially if you're Nintendo or Google or Apple. Go ask Larry Tesler if Ted Nelson isn't taking appointments.
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")
This is how you access the system menu of a specific window. That standard thing at the top left that has "Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize" and "Close" options.
In particular, Alt-Space, X is a pretty damn useful keyboard shortcut for maximizing current window.
Kinda weird that no one in on this app's team knows that.
For those who are reluctant to install a Google product on your computer (who knows what it will hoover up and associate with your Google identity), you can use Lucene to index your files: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka
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.
They've used their own search in the past 5 years right? Because it barely works, barely gives any results, straight up pretends queries have only 9 results that before they ruined it would have returned 6 figures of results.
In 10 years Google will be known for Android and Maps, I don't think they'll even be known for YouTube because TikTok if they dropped a web longform spin on their algo they'd displace YT within 3 years.
Is this a whole system indexing application? Instant search across all installed documents? I have nearly 40TB on my primary windows desktop computer and would LOVE that. Granted much of that is decades of home video but still.
> 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)
This is my biggest problem with a lot of modern desktop search.
Search in the Start Menu has been doing this by default for years. If I wanted to search the internet, I would have used the search box in my browser that is already open 24/7.
This doesn't add any convenience, it just pollutes search results with irrelevant garbage.
But the goal with these things isn't to provide a better user experience. It's to juice engagement metrics, because our industry sucks.
Hey, good stuff, well done. What else can be done from the registry there? Can I make it stop searching inside .doc* files etc and make it only do filename search there ala Everything?
For your security and convenience. Google has access to your Android phone, but, there are evil people who use computers. Google would like to know - like Microsoft and Apple - what are those people doing with their computers. /s
For your information - when you repeatedly tag transgressive comments as /s, you reveal more about your personal insecurities than what the opposition has to say.
If you have a good argument to make, make it. Comments like this one don't progress either side's understanding of the situation and devalues valuable discussion into hysteria (likely because you just dislike the consequences). PG realized it decades ago, despite his personal dysfunctions: https://themindcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Gra...
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.
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 this was most other companies or a random github project with decent activity I'd trust this more than installing software from Google on my computer during a time they're extremely interested in building data sets for ML work.
Since you're on HN, I assume you have a bit of curiosity so I encourage you to think beyond the first order effect of some of these news.
It isnt as much as "omg, we need more data!!" but as some of the other comments show, it is _probably_ part of a larger defensive move where most LLMs are moving into controlling-the-pc domain. OpenAI has something, Claude has something, so it is reasonable to expect Google to do something as well. The fact that it is Gemini is another clue that it is indeed that.
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.
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.)
PowerToys is not installed by default and neither is this Google app, obviously. It's absolutely reasonable that Google picks the most intuitive and common shortcut for an app launcher and if the user wants to maintain two or more launchers, it's up to them to configure non-conflicting keyboard shortcuts that are the most intuitive to them.
This is the opposite of what I want. I want the cool android-only stuff they build to be available on the web, not the web to be available on the desktop.
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.
Would you rather have Big Tech sit on their cash and not innovate? Some of these ones would 100% fail, and that's the nature of doing business. Apple is trying something radical with Vision Pro. It isnt successful, but I'm glad they are trying it. Microsoft did something crazy with Windows Recall. Will I use it? Nope, I appreciate the risk taking.
When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
My wish is folks on hacker news have a bit of humility about these kind of things.
> When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
No, because my friend (presumably) doesn't have an extensive track record of failing in business. But Google does have an extensive track record of killing products for no good reason. Precedent matters, and at this point it's foolish to start using any Google product that you don't have to.
To you. If you dont understand the reason, again, I encourage you to be humble and try to understand what is going on. Remember, all of these companies are operated by perfectly reasonable people.
This is a ridiculous reply. I'm not friends with Google. We're frenemies at best.
Google has zero reason to keep this effort going. It won't make them any significant money.
If I were a bettin' man, and I am, I'd say it's a promotion project for some developer or team who is going to abandon it as soon as they move on. Which is SOP for Google.
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
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!)
I'd consider this to be a better option.
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.
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
This is wrong. Windows supports per monitor DPI since Windows 8 and have an improved API since Windows 10. I find it the only good implementation among desktop OSes. It is the only one that guarantees that font renders align with the pixel grid.
Many old apps do not support this API though. It is opt-in and while there is a hybrid mode to let Windows scale fonts and Win32 components via API hooks, without implementing DPI change callback most apps turn into blurry mess.
Usually browsers have the gold standard implementation of those callbacks hence why Electron is used everywhere.
Brother I'm looking right at it. I cannot set one monitor to 120% and another to 160% (both are custom values), like on KDE. If I use a custom setting it gets applied to both monitors, in fact it gets grayed out for some reason - the values don't even show properly. Only a reset button available that logs you out to reset it to 100%.
If I want to set them to different scaling factors, I have to use one of the values from the drop downs (100/125/150/175/200%), which is not what I want.
You have literally said this:
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
Here are all of my monitors at different DPIs: https://imgur.com/a/q3z2P1E . They don't have a "single DPI" that gets applied to all of them. The custom DPI setting is for changing all base system DPI.
> I cannot set one monitor to 120% and another to 160% (both are custom values), like on KDE.
Okay you're unhappy with the granularity. Yes Windows uses 25% granularity.
I don't know if this will work but you can probably do a combination of changing the base DPI and then calculating the 25%. So you can set the base DPI to something like 120 (which is 125%) and then set the other monitor to 125% which gives 156%:
I think the base DPI is stored in this registry key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\AppliedDPI
It is a DWORD value
Thanks for detailed response. Do you happen to know if this is a recent change in Fedora/KDE? I tried somewhat recently, although I can't remember quite when that was. Gnome had experimental support for fractional scaling at the time but it wasn't good enough to switch to.
> Windows cannot do custom dpi per monitor, only a single custom dpi that gets applied to all monitors.
Yeah, support for custom DPI in general isn't great. I've been using https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/windows_10_dpi_fix.... for years to at least partially help.
Edit: I think I answered my own question about how recent the change might have been: https://blogs.kde.org/2024/12/14/this-week-in-plasma-better-...
This seems to be just after I last tried. I'll give it another go, thanks BatteryMountain!
As a word of warning, it is still not 100% perfect. I've noticed that on my laptop, when the Zed editor is maximized, there is a tiny gap between it and the panel at the bottom. I think this happens when an app, even if it supports fractional scaling in general, can't handle a logical window size that is not a whole number. To be fair, this is one of the only apps I've really had any scaling issues with lately, and it is just a minor visual annoyance. The Linux DPI scaling story is finally pretty solid.
Also, many apps (including Electron/Chromium apps) will still run under XWayland when using a Wayland session by default, because there are still a handful of small issues and omissions in their Wayland drivers. (It's pretty minor for Electron/Chromium so you can opt to force it to use native Wayland if you want.) In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.
Thats why you need to calculate which "eventual resolutions" divides down to values without fractions after your scaling has been applied.
So if you take a 2560x1440 panel, 160%/1.6 scaling factor will give you 1600x900, hence there won't be any artifacts. Between 100% and 200% there are maybe 5 combinations that will give you clean resolutions.
As an example:
Enter monitor Width (1920):
Enter monitor Height (1080):
1920x1080 at 100%
1600x900 at 120%
1536x864 at 125%
1280x720 at 150%
1200x675 at 160%
960x540 at 200%
800x450 at 240%
768x432 at 250%
640x360 at 300%
Aything besides these value WILL give you artifacts at some level.
> In case of XWayland apps, you'll have to choose between allowing X11 apps to scale themselves (like the old days) or having the compositor scale them (the scaling will be right, even across displays, but it will appear blurry at scales higher than 1x.) I still recommend the Wayland session overall; it gives a much more solid scaling experience, especially with multiple monitors.
I'm wondering if this was the problem I was running into before – it sounds eerily familiar. I never got far enough to explore individual apps outside of preinstalled ones because I couldn't get comfortable enough. I appreciate your response as I wasn't aware of the different session types.
Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling.
In both X11 and Wayland, you should usually see most applications following your scaling preferences nowadays. In Wayland sessions, you can ensure that applications always appear at the correct size, though at the cost of "legacy" applications appearing blurry. This behavior is configured in the Display Settings in KDE Plasma.
Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
> Yeah, it probably has something to do with this. In X11 sessions, the display server does not typically handle scaling. Instead, the desktop environments provide scaling preferences to UI toolkits that then do the scaling themselves. In Wayland, the display server does handle scaling.
Presumably this leads to a more unified scaling experience. This was one thing I was concerned about before, as it didn't seem that way. That's a solid improvement on its own.
> Also possibly useful: if you like the KDE Plasma session, it has a built-in magnifier; just hold Ctrl+Meta and use the scroll wheel.
This is useful yes, along with the rest of your comments. Thanks for your help.
So Gnome does support it, but it is terrible. Last I tried it, it also applied the custom scaling value to all the displays like Windows. KDE does it perfectly.
Curious about GNOME fractal scaling issues you experience.
I currently have the experimental feature enable at 150% scale for a laptop screen at 2560x1600 resolution. Have not had any issues by itself nor with an external 3440x1400 at 100% scale with GNOME 48.
I wish I could give you a better answer here, but I honestly don't remember. I only remember that something I needed was missing from it for me to make the switch.
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.
Part of my wonders if this is what Microsoft hoped would happen when they implemented the settings in the manner they did. But it hasn't played out that way.
It is.
Any app implementation of the windows setting could expose a multiplier of it somewhere. They already did the hard part of building a dynamic UI...
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)
I try to avoid using them. If I can, I prefer to configure my environment to not need them, but that does take a fair amount of work. I get by because of my technical knowledge. I don't know how other people cope.
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.
Google must really be feeling the pressure from ChatGPT. They picked up pace in a very noticeable way.
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.
I can't be the only one that will reach for ChatGPT first over Google for most of my search needs. Stuff like looking for recipes, guides on how to do certain things. From a user perspective, ChatGPT is 100% a Google killer. Search engines may still be powering the AI (for now), but if we aren't exposed to their ads, that's a losing proposition for the incumbants.
Probably wrecked their AdWord views.
> Google have wanted to get people out of the web
Why do you say that? And, why do they botch their own cash cow - AdWords?
Bringing search into an app and then consolidating the web experience there is more surface area for ads, not less.
How does a native app provide any "more surface area" for ads than a web page? Are they not displaying on the same screen?
It's more of a second order effect, once you train people to turn to your app for something instead of the open web you can then steer them towards more owned and operated experiences within that app instead of leaving.
Meta is the perfect example of this. In browser newsfeeds have the same ad load as the app but by steering everyone into an app and then controlling the experience there they make a shit ton more money.
They could frame the in-app content in ads. They wouldn't be able to do that using iframes on the web. (I guess in theory if they ... exploit Chrome then they could put ads there too).
I suppose they technically could overlay more ads, but they've already had mobile apps, Chrome and Chrome OS for decades and have never gone that far for obvious reasons.
This Google app is not a browser. Doing ads in a browser is not kosher. Doing ads in an app is more acceptable.
something like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45051920
Didn't the DOJ tell Alphabet to sell off Chrome and some of their advertising business to restore competition in online ads?
No. In the end Google was allowed to keep Chrome and their advertising business.
No
> Google have wanted to get people out of the web and into an app for a long time and have mostly failed
https://apps.apple.com/us/charts/iphone
Wasn't this done (20!) years ago? It seems very familiar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop#Results_list:_t...
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.
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.
Those boxes were for enterprises, not for you to plug into your laptop.
Right. The box wasn't necessary to search, but was an indicator of Google Desktop's success. Furthermore, we can still leverage the dead binary with just a little system hacking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5ieNv7oelk
What's the relationship between the search appliance and Google Desktop? I'm not seeing any connection.
There was an Enterprise version of the Desktop app that connected to the Google Search Appliance (yellow pizzabox) or Google Mini (blue pizzabox, not Google Home Mini) as well as searching Windows/Mac local/shared drives https://web.archive.org/web/20070302151851/https://desktop.g...
I’m not the OP but I see the connection as Google seeking growth and revenue by applying their general search know-how to areas outside of the Internet.
I followed search appliance closely when they announced it. It was interesting technically and looked cool, but seemed like a dead end similar to desktop as applications were largely moving off of racks/desktops. I was right about that, but I expected Google to offer a web-based search appliance and they never did beyond custom searches. Algolia fills that opportunity nicely now.
I'm guessing, I think the box was marketed as a networked version of the app, and GP might be drawing a bit hand-wavy connection between the two.
Could you clarify how this relates to the dead internet theory?
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.
I paid for AgentRansack / FileLocator Pro ten years ago and I still really like it. Will have to try Voidtools to compare.
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.
Fool me once, ...
It was a time when federated and unified views were considered the optimal user experience and there were many flavors of the concept at the time (msft had search providers that would let you service any kind of result in windows or sharepoint search). However, 'brand awareness' started to take over. Nobody wanted to be just a provide to an obviously google-ish experience because it makes them easier to replace.
Like with messaging apps, everything fractioned to fall to a zero sum game of exclusive 'experiences'.
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.
even today local search is hopelessly broken
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.
>local search is hopelessly broken on both Windows and Mac.
Not to derail this Windows thread, but is there anything that works remotely well on Mac? The built-in options are ... lacking
I find the file search annoying on Mac because it doesn't search the drive I'm in on finder (skill issue? Please tell me if that's configurable)
I find cmd+space to be 10000000x better than windows for applications though
Finder -> Settings (or Cmd-,) -> Advanced -> Default Search Scope
What's wrong with Finder and search scope set to "This Mac"?
The problem is the search ranking. It often ranks file names with partial matches higher than file names with full exact matches, and this frustrates me endlessly. For example I have a folder called "Home" containing documents like receipts for home improvement projects, manuals for appliances, mortgage statements from banks, etc. Searching for "Home" preferentially brings up random other files that has "home" in their names but this folder is ranked low. I have not found any way to adjust Spotlight's ranking heuristic.
Yeah, I have similar problems all the time and its heuristic is really strange. Like, it’ll emphasize a file called ._home_env_vars.sh buried in an old Python environment that hasn’t been accessed in 8 years over one just called “home” that I search for and open three times a week.
The other big thing that’s frustrating is it’s never clear to me when it’s done searching and when it still has more results to find.
I used Agent Ransack for search on Windows, though I'm not on Windows any longer.
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.
Try everything from voidtools, it's incredibly fast (both search and indexing).
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.
Potentially it was a different time. Google did hire Eric Schmidt whose previous company Novell was destroyed by Microsoft. Some say that NT stood for Novell or NetWare terminator.
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!
https://www.voidtools.com/downloads/
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)
Stick this with Powertoys Run or Command Palette then your windows can become pretty powerful.
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.
Yeah, and they could have done this many moons ago, not waiting until now.
Of course but we can't change the past. Just glad Microsoft shifted their focus back to developers.
I very much enjoy Everything whenever I use Windows. I wonder what's the equivalent for Linux, plocate?
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.
> which likely make it impossible
Huge exaggeration.
It just needs to be ext4, and like 90% would be covered b you by that.
For remaining 10%, (and only if you care), XFS and btrfs would be more than enough.
There's fsearch which has a similar UI but isn't as fast.
I love Everything + Wox (www.wox.one), have been my default setup on all Windows installs
But Google App is more than a search bar for filesystem, it's like Perplexity
Can it search file tags?
Does it have Gemini?
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 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.
On a related note: WHY does the stock calculator and clock apps on my Google Pixel phone even have a fucking privacy policy?
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.
This feels like a departure from Google’s usual approach. On desktop, Google has historically pushed everything into the browser, especially Chrome where they enjoy massive market share. Aside from some experiments in the 2000s like Google Desktop, they have not really released native Windows apps in the past decade.
Mobile is different, Google has plenty of native apps on Android and iOS. But on desktop almost everything has been browser based such as YouTube, Gmail or Docs. Personally, I would love to see something like a native YouTube Music app similar to Spotify instead of being locked into a browser tab.
I think part of this shift comes from the pressure of modern native apps like ChatGPT’s desktop client. With a quick shortcut like Alt+Space you instantly open a search/chat box, that kind of OS level integration is not possible with a browser or even with PWAs.
So while this might look like a small product announcement, I see it as a bit of a paradigm change for Google.
I still use Google desktop on a dedicated computer to search our local network. Its been running since about 2008.
It also probably started as a hedge for the divesture from Chrome that DoJ was seeking.
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.
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.
Isn't that how MS and Google lost anti-trust cases?
MS got hit kinda hard back in the 2000s right?
But since then most cases have been nothing more than slaps on the wrist? Have any major companies faced dire consequences for their anticompetitive practice.
So why would they stop using their market position in ways that benefit them and at worst result in minor fines or wrist slaps?
Are you sure they lost? If the CEOs had perfect crystal balls and knew that those particular business practices would result in the penalties that they got in their court cases, I bet they still would have done the same things.
Not that I am an expert in each case, but as part of the evidence was that people in leadership/decision making positions were informed that their practices and conduct was unlawful.
> Are you sure they lost?
Well, Chrome and not Microsoft's browser is the dominant webbrowser, and at the heart of MSFT's anti trust case was bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. So, yes. MS did lose.
Raycast is also coming to Windows at some point - https://www.raycast.com/windows
It already is on Windows and I've been using it for 1+ months and it is awesome.
Being open source is a big deal to me in tooling. So much so that if google's launcher isn't at least source available, i'll pass
> Microsoft PowerToys Run
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!
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.
On KDE plasma, there's KRunner (Alt + Space default), also pretty neat.
no doubt chrome will automatically install it at some point
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.
Why would I use it, when it has every possibility of getting yanked in the future?
Doesn't everyone and everything have a chance of getting yanked? If this really makes your life better (assuming it does) for two years and then ends, didn't it give you two good years?
No. There is a totally local app called Everything. Thanks to Win32 API stability it will work "forever".
"all have a chance" does not imply "all have equal chances"
Agreed. Won't be falling for that trap. Personally it's very hard to trust Google consumer products existing after 2-3 years.
"to help you find what you need, faster" yeah, I know you care about me, google.
Press Alt+Space to activate? Nobody activate window menus from keyboard any more?
It's because ChatGPT uses the same shortcut and Google is afraid to lose even more market share to it so they now use the same shortcut and the search bar is obviously designed after the ChatGPT desktop program.
I looked up some screenshots of the ChatGPT desktop program, it doesn't look anything like the screenshot in this post unless there's some other search mode that nobody's taken a screenshot of. I think it's more likely that Google copied both the UI look and the shortcut from Apple Spotlight, which you activate with Cmd+Space (Alt+Space on a PC layout keyboard).
The ChatGPT app has two window modes: A full experience that looks like the website, and the "quick input" that looks like this Google Bar, which comes up with aforementioned keyboard shortcut.
Thanks, I found a page on their site that goes over this: https://help.openai.com/en/articles/9982051-using-the-chatgp...
I still think that the Google Windows program looks more like Apple Spotlight than the ChatGPT companion window pictured there though.
Many people don't know how to cut and paste via the keyboard. The vast majority aren't even aware of Alt+Space. The only reason I use Alt+Space is to recover windows from off-screen areas.
I'm blind and alt+space is sometimes the best way to access select/copy/paste on the terminal. some other apps that have terrible a11y experience as well, but usually I use it there to closethe app asap.
Is the terminal you're referring to within, outside, or both within and outside a windowing system? How does it work? I'm not able to find an instance where alt+space does anything related to select/copy/paste.
It can be useful to fix window positions when a window gets stuck off-screen:
1. Alt+Space to activate the menu;
2. Down Arrow; Enter to restore the screen (if maximized or minimized);
3. Alt+Space to activate the menu;
4. Down Arrow; Down Arrow; Enter to move the window;
5. Arrow Keys to change the window position.
Quicker to just do (assuming the window is active/in foreground):
1. Alt+Space+m
2. Arrow keys to move around
I think pressing the Windows key + arrow keys is simpler.
Win+arrow does nothing if the window has a fixed size.
I do, every day. It's part of my muscle memory to maximize windows.
It's a little annoying that this Google app steals the alt+space shortcut, but you can remap it.
Since the window menu actions that aren’t terrible with keyboard also have their own direct keyboard shortcuts (move and size are the ones that don’t, but hand positioning windows instead of using snap positions is tedious with keyboard), I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a fairly rare thing.
I was thinking about Maximise, Restore, and Minimise, which I think were Alt+Space {X,R?,N} (haven’t used Windows for a few years), but I suppose Win+Up is now Maximise, and Win+Down Restore and Minimise—but you still need Alt+Space N to minimise from maximised.
win+(down)(down) is more convenient than alt+space, N, IMO.
If you type Win+Down,Down quickly, when you bring the window up again, is it maximised?
I remapped it to Scroll Lock.
You can also activate by clicking the "G" system tray icon.
I activate trabucco with alt+space. Menus I just use the shortcut of the thing I need to do.
Anyone remember Google Desktop[1] that had built in search?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Desktop
The design is totally stolen from Ubiquity. I love Ubiquity so I'm not complaining but the Raskin clan should get some credit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)
All of these "desktop search bars for everything" look way too generic for there to be really anything "stolen" either way. Credit for what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
The design methodology goes way back. If you're in the Bay Area go to the Computer History Museum and inquire with a Mr. Ted Nelson. People have been singing this gospel for years and now that, "everyone's shit out of ideas" suddenly the Bigs get wise to, "humane UI patterns?" I don't buy it. Specifically summoning a text prompt with a UI short-hand is copyrightable; especially if you're Nintendo or Google or Apple. Go ask Larry Tesler if Ted Nelson isn't taking appointments.
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")
Honestly I'd expect some new Web API built into chrome for this
"Try it for yourself by opting into the experiment in Labs."
This is a really confusing call to action.
Given the context, it seems unambiguous to me.
What is confusing about it?
I think he was expecting it to be an app download, forgetting that Google can push this feature to everyone via Chrome.
Why would anyone trust Google with features and services anymore?
They'll run with it a bit, maybe release it, then abandon it shortly there after and eventually shut it down.
> just press Alt + Space
This is how you access the system menu of a specific window. That standard thing at the top left that has "Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize" and "Close" options.
In particular, Alt-Space, X is a pretty damn useful keyboard shortcut for maximizing current window.
Kinda weird that no one in on this app's team knows that.
ChatGPT does the same thing :-/ This is why Claude Desktop explicitly uses Ctrl-Alt-Space on Windows as its default shortcut rather than Alt-Space
All they know is that's how spotlight on their Mac works and that Copilot and ChatGPT opens.
For those who are reluctant to install a Google product on your computer (who knows what it will hoover up and associate with your Google identity), you can use Lucene to index your files: https://github.com/wisercoder/eureka
Finally a competitor to spotlight search on Mac
Exactly what I was thinking! I like spotlight a lot more than the Windows start menu.
I believe Raycast (which I like a lot on macOS) also has an upcoming Windows version.
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.
They've used their own search in the past 5 years right? Because it barely works, barely gives any results, straight up pretends queries have only 9 results that before they ruined it would have returned 6 figures of results.
In 10 years Google will be known for Android and Maps, I don't think they'll even be known for YouTube because TikTok if they dropped a web longform spin on their algo they'd displace YT within 3 years.
I guess this will be killed soon enough, like so many Google projects.
It really surprises me that Google is going back to making desktop software outside of Chrome, certainly because of the native ChatGPT client.
Google Toolbar is back, baby!
Looks like they forgot to scrub an old confirmation page too - I can still join Google+! https://www.google.com/toolbar/ie/done.html
I cannot tell.
Is this a whole system indexing application? Instant search across all installed documents? I have nearly 40TB on my primary windows desktop computer and would LOVE that. Granted much of that is decades of home video but still.
> 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)
This is my biggest problem with a lot of modern desktop search.
Search in the Start Menu has been doing this by default for years. If I wanted to search the internet, I would have used the search box in my browser that is already open 24/7.
This doesn't add any convenience, it just pollutes search results with irrelevant garbage.
But the goal with these things isn't to provide a better user experience. It's to juice engagement metrics, because our industry sucks.
I have a blog post for you (shameless plug):
https://fratellobigio.com/posts/make-windows-search-fast-aga...
Hey, good stuff, well done. What else can be done from the registry there? Can I make it stop searching inside .doc* files etc and make it only do filename search there ala Everything?
Good question! To do that I think you can do the following:
- open Indexing Options (get to there from the Start Menu, or from Control Panel)
- click on Advanced
- go to the File Types tab
- find doc, docx, or whatever in the list
- change from "Index Properties and File Contents" to "Index Properties Only"
Honestly I haven't tried this so I can't vouch for it, but it seems to be the official way to go.
I'm pretty sure you can configure said desktop searches to exclude web results. At least on KDE it's pretty easy to do, one box to untick.
> already open 24/7
I have, sadly, started closing Safari so that my laptop is still charged the next time I open it.
For your security and convenience. Google has access to your Android phone, but, there are evil people who use computers. Google would like to know - like Microsoft and Apple - what are those people doing with their computers. /s
For your information - when you repeatedly tag transgressive comments as /s, you reveal more about your personal insecurities than what the opposition has to say.
If you have a good argument to make, make it. Comments like this one don't progress either side's understanding of the situation and devalues valuable discussion into hysteria (likely because you just dislike the consequences). PG realized it decades ago, despite his personal dysfunctions: https://themindcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Gra...
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.
Is it too cynical to assume that their goal is to get more data for their LLMs?
No I'm sure that's part of it. Also about gaining market share.
I think this could be the first step to offer a more aggressive AI service similar to Microsoft Copilot Vision.
>search for information from your computer files
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.
It's actually also already built into Windows if you have a Copilot+ PC, hit Windows-Q to activate it
The most exciting thing for windows in a decade to come up. Remember when this was the norm in 2010?
Would this be Google not admitting that AI/ChatGPT are eating into Search usage?
Alt+Space
Several apps already fight for that keyboard shortcut sequence. Claude, now this...
if this was most other companies or a random github project with decent activity I'd trust this more than installing software from Google on my computer during a time they're extremely interested in building data sets for ML work.
Is this just Google Desktop again?
… in other words, submit all of the data on your PC to Google to train their LLMs on.
Since you're on HN, I assume you have a bit of curiosity so I encourage you to think beyond the first order effect of some of these news.
It isnt as much as "omg, we need more data!!" but as some of the other comments show, it is _probably_ part of a larger defensive move where most LLMs are moving into controlling-the-pc domain. OpenAI has something, Claude has something, so it is reasonable to expect Google to do something as well. The fact that it is Gemini is another clue that it is indeed that.
Exactly what I was wondering.
Also, they are probably trying to figure out how to replace search traffic that switched to ChatGPT.
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.
Why everyone hijacks alt-space? Same key for copilot
Maybe if can index my files as well, better than microsft
Nice! I wonder when it's going to get abandoned. I give it one year.
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.)
Any launcher on any OS uses alt+space or win+space. Weird that you think this is somehow a power toys thing.
The decency? Classless?
PowerToys is not installed by default and neither is this Google app, obviously. It's absolutely reasonable that Google picks the most intuitive and common shortcut for an app launcher and if the user wants to maintain two or more launchers, it's up to them to configure non-conflicting keyboard shortcuts that are the most intuitive to them.
alt+space was already a Windows window menu hotkey since Windows 3.1
Alt+Space is already a universal shortcut key binding on Windows.
Seems like a data grab
Though, this time, seems they'll have access to everything on your computer (?), not just your online identity
I guess they feel like Microsoft shouldn't get to be the only company spying on everyone's personal files.
Do they use own index?
This is the opposite of what I want. I want the cool android-only stuff they build to be available on the web, not the web to be available on the desktop.
Is it bigger spyware than the website?
Sorry, but Launchy already has my ALT+SPACE shortcut and all my user love!
I can't wait for this to be abandoned in a couple of years!
I can't get ride of this shit on my Android phone, I can't imagine the nightmare to be inflicted that annoying this on my computer too...
What about releasing the source of Android 16 QPR1 instead? Forgot about that one?
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.
While I'm at it, let me mail my hard drives and birth certificate to the Google offices.
[dead]
[dead]
Aaaaaand it's shut down
Would you rather have Big Tech sit on their cash and not innovate? Some of these ones would 100% fail, and that's the nature of doing business. Apple is trying something radical with Vision Pro. It isnt successful, but I'm glad they are trying it. Microsoft did something crazy with Windows Recall. Will I use it? Nope, I appreciate the risk taking.
When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
My wish is folks on hacker news have a bit of humility about these kind of things.
> When your friend comes upto you and says "We're starting a business", do you immediately go like "haha, you're gonna lose?"
No, because my friend (presumably) doesn't have an extensive track record of failing in business. But Google does have an extensive track record of killing products for no good reason. Precedent matters, and at this point it's foolish to start using any Google product that you don't have to.
> killing products for no good reason
To you. If you dont understand the reason, again, I encourage you to be humble and try to understand what is going on. Remember, all of these companies are operated by perfectly reasonable people.
This is a ridiculous reply. I'm not friends with Google. We're frenemies at best.
Google has zero reason to keep this effort going. It won't make them any significant money.
If I were a bettin' man, and I am, I'd say it's a promotion project for some developer or team who is going to abandon it as soon as they move on. Which is SOP for Google.
Please make it so downvotes (thumbs down) requires a double click. I don't want to send hurtful signals when I accidentally hit that.
There is an unvote link.
First you would have to have the permission to downvote.
That was a generic comment for LLM developers to take note for any product, I hate downvoting useful responses by accident.