Deskbar Applet - Integrating Google Search on the Linux Desktop

Deskbar is an applet available for Gnome users which incorporates all the search functions into one single utility. To start using this applet, one has to download it from the repositories which is quite simple as running the command:

# apt-get install deskbar-applet

...if you are using a Debian based system. Once the applet is installed on the machine, one has to add it to the panel. This is because, this applet does not work as a standalone application and needs a wrapper for it to work. I added the Deskbar applet to the panel by right clicking on the panel and then clicking the "Add to Panel..." menu selection.

I have been using this applet for some time now and am really impressed by the amount of search integration that is possible on the desktop. In fact, it wouldn't be far off if one compares Deskbar to its search counterpart - spotlight on OSX.

Fig: Deskbar applet in action on the Gnome desktop

Some of the things which I found really interesting with this nifty search tool are as follows :

1. Excellent integration with Beagle to search for files containing a certain text.
2. Open applications by just typing the name of the application in the deskbar text box.
3. Yahoo search engine integration : Just type in some text in the Deskbar input residing in your panel and supposing you are online, a series of web search results pop up on your desktop .
4. Google web search on your desktop : I found this really interesting because Google has not released an equivalent search tool for Linux platform yet, similar to that for windows. But to have an integrated Google search in Linux (using Deskbar of course), some additional work has to be done.
   

Steps to integrate Google web search with Deskbar applet

The first thing to do is go to Google API page and create an account. If you have a gmail account, then that would be sufficient. Once the account is created, Google will generate a Google Web API licence key and send it to the email address that was specified while creating the account. The key has to be retrieved and placed in the file '~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/Google.key' . This licence key has to be included with every call made to the Google Web API service which is exactly what the Deskbar applet does. Google allows one to make upto 1000 queries per day in this manner.

Fig: The licence key generated by Google

Next step is to download the Google developers kit (which is around 650 KB in size) from the same site and extract the file GoogleSearch.wsdl and store it in the location '~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/GoogleSearch.wsdl' . That is it. Now if a query is typed in the Deskbar applet, a list pops up giving the results of the Google web search for the query. Double clicking one of the query result will open the corresponding web page in the default web browser.