Today I checked in a few fun changes to Beagle today focused on the idea of emphasizing relationships between entities. It doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun, but its kinda nifty.
New Query Context Options
- Find Documents by same author.
- Find E-mails from same contact.
- Find Pages from same site.
In addition (building upon Beagle’s new External Metadata system) I have added support for the tracking of Firefox downloads to files. The file downloaded with Firefox has an extra property (beagle:Origin) which denotes the Url it was downloaded from. I haven’t started to integrate anything on the UI side with this new information, as I want to add support for Epiphany, Opera, and Konqeror. Eventually, I would love to see this kind of mapping from downloaded mail attachments, but thats a little more difficult.
Anyways, this is more work towards my eventual goal of a ranking system based upon relationships (among desktop data). Anyways, I know that no feature-centric blog post is complete without screenshots, so I present:
Beagle’s powerful and simple query language makes stuff like this really easy, its just a matter of knowing what properties warrant special treatment like this. I’m open to ideas, what
Google Desktop for Linux has been around not nearly as long and it indexes my files much faster, using far less system resources AND it indexes my email in Thunderbird.
Beagle has a long way to go to catch up.
While you are more than entitled to your opinion, I want to add a few small corrections.
1) Google desktop for linux may run faster on your system, thats great, lots of people have had some serious issues with system resource usage and ‘locking’, similar to some issues beagle has had, both are new(er) technologies.
2) Google Desktop for Linux does index raw files very well, but does not support nearly as many applications (backends) as beagle.
3) Beagle does have support for Thunderbird now, we just haven’t released it yet, if you really want it, wait and see the next release.
4) This is a post about some new and more powerful relationship building in beagle, not about Beagle competiting with Google Desktop for Linux.
5) While the Linux release of Google Desktop Search is indeed a recent release, the core technologies of Google Search (specifically on the desktop) have been around a weee bit longer, and seem to have a little more developer time.
I don’t want to be blasting GDS for Linux, its defiantly awesome, I like beagle for my own reasons, pick for yourself, I just want to make sure that anyone reading has my own biased response available
Cheers!