Just after I started the blog, I decided to setup Google Desktop. For those not familiar with it, it is like having a google engine on your desktop which can search the files in your hard drive and tell you where they are.
It is a great tool, specially if you are trying to find an article which you want to read or a document you read ages ago which talked about, let's say, 'website genres'. All you have to do is type the words 'website genres' in the neat search field on the windows taskbar and voilá Google Desktop gives you the files which match the search criteria. All sounds very nice, except when you start searching... The problem is, that by default your whole fixed drive (usually C:) is scanned (crawled is the approporiate term) and indexed. This means that you usually get a lot of results (depending on the search, thousands of them). But in my case, I do not want a lot of results! I just want to search the papers and articles I have in a specific folder in my C: drive.
Ahhh, it's simple, just tell Google Desktop that the only place you want it to index is that particular folder!! I wish it was that simple! As far as I could see, there is no way of telling it to scan just a folder in the C: drive! And if it does allow you to do it, the instructions are not easily found.
What you have to do if you want GD to scan just one of your folders is to tell it to exclude all folders from the indexing...except the ones you want to search.
OK, I thought, just open the 'add folder to exclusion list' window, CTRL click on all forlders you want to exclude and I'll be done. WRONG! You can not CTRL click or even SHIFT click...you have to input folder by folder...
Here's a picture of a the first third of excluded folders I had to manually input.
Nice one Google!!!
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