Google Desktop... Uses 2.3GB of your drive???????????

Everyone seems to be shouting praises about Google Desktop… however, reading through one persons experience, I have a concern.

“It finished surprisingly fast (over the night). 216K items, of them ~36K emails. The index is 2.3Gb.” – Jan Haugland

OK, so if my math isn’t failing me, that’s approximately 11+k per “document” indexed. 11K!!!! That can’t be right? Also, I would have liked to known how large those documents consume on the drive.

Also, if it took all night to process that many files… how much CPU is used to keep this 2.3GB index up to date whenever files are added/modified? Is searching through your documents really taking all that much time? How often are you actually doing a search? To me, for the amount of times I’m actually looking for something, the search built into XP seems to work just fine. Sure, it’s not instant… but do I want to give up a percent of my drive and CPU cycles for the rare instances that I need to do a search just so it happens Google-fast? I could understand maybe coming up with a solution to find emails faster (which I believe there are other products available that do just Outlook); but word documents, source code, IE’s browser cache, etc…

Now, to be clear, I haven’t actually tried this myself. I’m waiting to hear everyone else’s impression first. I have to admit I’m a little leery of using it and I’m a bit greedy with my hard drive usage… no matter how much I have, I keep running out of it.