Google Wants a Place on Your Desktop

Some time ago, Microsoft announced that desktop based search was going to be integrated into future releases of their Windows operating system.

Knowing this, search-engine mover & shaker Google has released a beta version of their Google Desktop Search software. It's available for download now, and with it, you will be able to search files on your computer, including your email, web pages viewed, saved chat sessions, Excel, Powerpoint, and Word documents, and text and HTML files. The application runs continuously in your computer's memory, scanning and indexing new documents as they arrive through email or as they are created or copied on to your system. It's available only for Windows 2000 SP 3 and Windows XP systems right now, and requires 500MB of disk space.

There are some big limitations. Hopefully Google will improve in this area as they continue development of this software. For example, Desktop Search can only read email in Outlook or Outlook Express. Though Outlook does indeed have a large market share among email clients, surely Google realizes that a large number of people are moving towards other email clients that may not be as susceptible to email-borne security flaws. The same applies to cached web pages - right now, you can only search those viewed with Internet Explorer 5 or greater, while growing numbers of surfers are moving to maturing alternative browsers such as Mozilla and Opera.

Perhaps an even more curious omission is that this software can't index PDF documents. Google can do this online, and it's not like PDF documents are rare. Maybe they're saving it for a future release.

For now, if you're still riding the Microsoft train all the way on your PC, and plan to stay that way, Google Desktop Search is probably worth checking out, as it probably closely mirrors Microsoft's planned capabilities. Otherwise, you may want to hold off to see how this tool evolves.

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