>search for information from your computer files

Absolutely not. This is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone.

I'm sure everyone already understands this, but just to be clear:

There is NEVER, just NEVER, ABSOLUTELY NEVER, going to be a SINGLE QUERY that you want to search BOTH your local files AND the web for. If you want to search the web, you open the web browser. If you want to search your local files, you want privacy which means you don't want the query going to the online search engine. It's a catastrophic privacy risk to put both things in the same box just for the convenience to not have to open the web browser, which is completely pointless either way because you're going to have the browser later anyway if you want a web result.

I'm convinced that Microsoft, Google and (once) Canonical do this fully knowing that some people don't take their own privacy seriously with computer devices or lack the understanding to do so, and when they start letting these things happen and accepting these intrusions, it becomes normalized and suddenly nobody has any privacy left. In the future all your local files will be posted to web servers automatically all the time without consent because that's just what will be the "normal" and accepted pattern by then. This already happens with OneDrive. People get their files sent to Microsoft all the time having no idea it is happening. Google Drive is the same for mobile. People use the "cloud" barely understanding that their data is in someone else's computer, and in many cases without even being aware that they are using the cloud in first place.

The worst of all is that even if you wanted this, in 5 years it's probably going to be "sunsetted" anyway since it's Google.

> This is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone.

Windows itself is trying to turn a desktop computer into a mobile phone. I try to avoid google and windows because of privacy issues already, but even without them I'm afraid it's only going to get harder to own a computer that does work for you without also being used against you by somebody else.

It's actually also already built into Windows if you have a Copilot+ PC, hit Windows-Q to activate it