Google Desktop Search "crawls" my computer

March 19, 2006 9:53 AM

Why has Google Desktop Search's indexing become so slow?

I've been running GDS with no problem for over a year. When I first installed it, GDS indexed more than 100,000 files on my machine in about a day. I moved a lot of files, after which GDS couldn't find them. (As far as I know, there's no easy way to fix this "feature" of GDS.) I decided to re-index the files. GDS took more than a day to index 500 emails and less than 2,000 files, and I wasn't doing a lot else on the computer. I tried installing the latest version of GDS, and got the same glacially slow results. I really don't want to wait a month for GDS to finish. Any suggestions?

posted by lukemeister to computers & internet (6 comments total)

GDS will downgrade its search priority if you're using the computer at all. Lock the desktop and go away for a while and see how it does.

Also, when you uninstalled GDS did you actually make sure it deleted the cache? If not you should uninstall again.

Also, are you using the 'encrypt GDS cache' option? That slows it down as well.
posted by tiamat at 10:07 AM on March 19, 2006

I've been using Copernic desktop search for a couple of months now and find it superior to Google.
posted by any major dude at 10:38 AM on March 19, 2006

tiamat: Thanks, but I already tried all three suggestions.

any major dude: I have installed Copernic, and it looks great so far. I'm not giving up on GDS yet, but I'll try both for now.
posted by lukemeister at 11:12 AM on March 19, 2006

To force a full reindexing you need to:
1. Close Google Desktop
2. Delete the \Google Desktop Search Data\ directory.
3. Delete the following registry keys:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\HistoricalCapture
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Google\Google Desktop\Status
4. Restart Google desktop. You should get the message "Google Desktop is indexing for the first time..."

Note: if you're using Thunderbird, the indexing only happens while Thunderbird is open. It might be the same with Outlook. I've written these instructions for GDS 1.0, but I think it should also work for later versions.
posted by Sharcho at 12:20 PM on March 19, 2006

Sharcho: Thanks, that seems to work. I didn't know I had to delete the registry keys.
posted by lukemeister at 2:13 PM on March 19, 2006

OT, but I switched to Copernic after Google stopped working and its been really great.
posted by Mid at 6:47 PM on March 19, 2006