Thursday, November 11, 2004

Java Desktop Search tool

I find that the Google Desktop Search tool, is an extremly usefull tool. But one that has many disadvantages, it is very MS orientated. It can only read emails from MS apps, can only read web history from IE, it can only read Word document (by default). As many people goes about and try to figure on how to add the FireFox web history into GDS, perhaps there is another way.


Since Ive used Lucene before and find this an extremly good search tool/API for java, which is very lean and quick; I came up with an idea, Why not make this in Java? This would be a blast for all Linux users as well, since there is no GDS for linux (right?). Of course it will probably be hard to pair up with the searching techniques done by Google, since they've done this for years. But I still think there is an opportunity here for an open-source project that can work in all platforms.


By making it in java, it would be very simpel to add other searches, such as:

  • MP3 files ID3 tags
  • Thunderbirds emails
  • Columba emails (Java based email program)
  • Open office documents
  • Miranda chat logs
  • ICQ chat logs, etc...
For presentating the stuff, the Velocity engine could be used for seperating the logic and presentation. Velocity is a very nice tool for simpel web based applications.

But I wonder if there are already any very light weight web servers that can be used for this?


One problem is that google is going to fill this void, so its either now or never!