I dabble in Google applications, but not wholeheartedly. I am not keen on one company knowing much about me. I love Picasa, I profit from AdSense, and I use Google Mail occasionally.
(I prefer Atlantis over Google Docs, Eudora over Google Mail, Yahoo News over Google News, and so on.)
Last night it occurred to me that Google Mail does have a significant advantage in one area, which might become increasingly important: indexing. For example, re-installing software that I downloaded, and now I need to hunt down the license number that was sent by email.
It's always been a painful wait to have Eudora find an email msg, because it holds 13 years of my mail. I haven't counted them all, but one folder alone -- press releases -- holds 12,000 messages going back to Jan, 2000. Other mailboxes are even bigger. Searching for an email in Eudora reminds me of doing hidden-line removal with CAD software in 1988 or waiting for Windows to boot in 2008.
Eudora has an indexing feature, as does Windows and other software. But you know the drawback: all that disc activity slows down the rest of the computer. In therms of Windows, I normally place documents in orderly folders, so I don't need Windows indexing -- which I've turned completely off in Vista.
This is one area where Google Mail is brilliant: Google does the indexing for you, on their computers. Searching email is fast; your computer is not slowed down by the indexing.
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