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).
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
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'.
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?
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")
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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 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.
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.)
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.
(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
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.
Not to derail this Windows thread, but is there anything that works remotely well on Mac? The built-in options are ... lacking
I find cmd+space to be 10000000x better than windows for applications though
Fool me once, ...
Like with messaging apps, everything fractioned to fall to a zero sum game of exclusive 'experiences'.
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
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.
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.
This is a really confusing call to action.
- 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.
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?
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.
Now if only Google would bring back the Google One Windows VPN client.
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 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)
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.
https://fratellobigio.com/posts/make-windows-search-fast-aga...
I have, sadly, started closing Safari so that my laptop is still charged the next time I open it.
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.
Also, they are probably trying to figure out how to replace search traffic that switched to ChatGPT.
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.
(I know the hotkey combo is customizable, but it's still offputting that they chose that one.)
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.