I know I'm a bit "late" weighing in with my opinion of Google Desktop for Mac. I mean, it's been available for a full 38 hours or so. What have I been waiting for???

Nothing. Well, except maybe some sort of flood of enthusiasm to hit me - unrestrained excitement about Google Desktop's availability for the Mac. I mean, Windows users have had it forever, right?

Well, that rush of excitement still hasn't hit me, but I installed the beta version of Google Desktop anyway (it's free!). I figured I'd listened to people complain about Spotlight long enough that I'd find out for myself whether Google can do a better job than Apple at designing search functionality.

The key complaints about Spotlight are:

1. It's slow.

2. It doesn't display editable file paths in the results list. What I mean by editable is that you can't select the file path and paste it into an email message, say, when you're trying to let a co-worker know that a certain file is saved in a certain location on the company server. You can view a file path in Spotlight, of course, by letting your mouse cursor hover over the file name in the results list.

3. You can't search for specific phrases using quote marks or Boolean operators. It takes multi-word searches, of course, but your results will feature both words out of sequence, in addition to the words as a phrase, making results less accurate and harder to find if it's a common phrase.

I can search for easter bunny in Spotlight, but not "easter bunny" (in quotes) which would tell it that I wanted only files that include that specific phrase.

I imagine all of these problems will be addressed in Leopard. But until then, Google Desktop is a great free alternative. Gmail users will have all the more incentive, since it can index your Gmail email, too.

Here are my top three most fave features of Google Desktop, with a couple of complaints thrown in:

1. It's fast. It indexes the files on your Mac in short order, and you can still work while it's doing its thang after you first install it. And it returns results fast, too. We do wish, however, that it would not do that annoying thing that Spotlight also does: starting to search before you're done entering the full search phrase. Argh!

Google Desktop's speed is, I suspect, probably partially due to the fact that it starts searching before you're done typing your full search phrase. Spotlight does the same thing, though, and it's annoying.

2. It can search (and then call up) results from deleted documents. That's right - all is not lost! Even if you accidentally or even intentionally trashed something then emptied the trash.

3. You can search for files on your Mac exactly as you would on Google, using quotes to enclose exact phrases, plus and minus signs to note inclusion and exclusions, and so on.

For a free app, there's really not much to knock about it, although some privacy wonks/Mac system purists have registered suspicion about how and where Google Desktop installs the various pieces and parts that make it work. I figure everything I do is being spied on by someone - Hi, Rod! (Rod works in our IT department here at Mac|Life) - so I don't worry about that kind of thing. I leave that up to Rik and Eugene.

Lemme know in the comments what you love (or hate) about Google Desktop. Or why you, too, had a hard time getting out the pom-pons when it launched yesterday.