Slowed to a (Google) crawl

I've been a long-time fan of the Google Desktop app, and quickly installed the new release this morning. Since much of the language in their individually customized news service had a lot of similarity to ours (although ours will be limited to activity within our suite of services), I spent more time playing with today it than I should have.

I'm no software geek, but there's one piece of the package that is annoying as the worst adware, and seems to be pointless (at least to me as the end user).

The program slows up my computer pretty badly. Or perhaps I should say one aspect of it does-- there is a .exe file called GoogleDesktopCrawl that uses up the bulk of my CPU. (See screenshot in continuation.)

What's interesting is that you can quit the process without the rest of the program ceasing to work.

What's even more interesting is that the screenshot below tells me that Google apparently expected people like me to figure this out and try to remove it.

So, gearheads, what is the purpose of that app? I would have guessed indexing, but this still occurs even though my whole system is indexed.

Comments

[Rob Clark]

From what I understand, the Google Desktop Search is designed to always run in the background, always catching and indexing every new file - hence the crawl and index will always appear in the process list. That much is normal.

However, it shouldn't be eating up your CPU as it currently is. Google recommends uninstalling, rebooting and then reinstalling the desktop search tool. http://desktop.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12661&topic=212