Where is the Google Desktop Search keeping its index?

Factual Questions
#1

I like the Google Desktop Search program, but I’d like to know how much disk space it’s using with its index of my HD contents.

It doesn’t seem to be in any of the obvious places, like under C:\Program Files\Google or C:\Program Files\Google\Google Desktop Search.

#2

You might also try C:\Documents and Settings<username>\Application Data\ and C:\Documents and Settings<username>\Local Settings. A lot of applications use subdirectories based under one or both of those paths for data and cache.

#3

Mine is kept here, on Windows XP:

C:\Documents and Settings*username*\Local Settings\Application Data\Google

Right now it is 29 MB and I have 400 items indexed. When it finishes, I will post the total number of items and the size.

#4

Thanks guys.

Mine is done; I don’t know how many items it indexed, but the index is 221 meg, for about 45 gig of data. Not bad, seems like it’ll be worth it.

#5

What does a Google Desktop Search Engine do? Why would I want it?

#6

The Google Desktop Search Engine is a program that lets you search for files on your local hard drive. It is MUCH faster than the built in search Windows comes with - on my machine, the search finishes faster than the Windows Search takes to find the first item.

And for the record, my index files are ~125MB, for about 150GB of stuff. Not bad.

#7

That’s a remarkably different ratio than mine, I wonder why. Did you mean maybe mean a 150 gig drive that still has over 100 gig free, possibly?

#8

Well, mine was 49 MB for 12 GB of data. But I think the type of data you have has a great effect on the index size. If I had 10 gig’s of MP3’s, they would take almost no index space, only the titles and possible ID3 info for each one. If I had 10 gigs of Word documents, however, I bet the index would be huge.

I just pulled that example out of the air, I don’t know which types of documents it even attempts to index, but the concept is valid.

#9

Good point MC$E.

#10

Minor mistake in my disk size counting - I have a 100GB & 80GB drives in my computer, and am using 140Gb, but 20GB is in for my Linux partition. Windows can see about 120GB of stuff, with 35-40 or so gigs left open for Windows. I have a lot of .mp3 files & large movie files, that take up quite a bit of space but are easy to index, and not so many text documents. Google Desktop Search is reporting 37,824 searchable items.