Review: Google Desktop
| Published 10/22/04

Graphic by: Jenny Conner

It indexes, it searches, it caches, and it's free! What is it? Itís the Google Desktop of course, and it could be making its way to a desktop near you. The Google Desktop is a free, downloadable program from Google that allows you to search your own computer just like you were searching the web.

The Google Desktop can search your computer for saved emails (from MS Outlook), TXT files, HTML files, MS Word documents, MS Excel documents, PowerPoint presentations, and saved AIM/AOL chat logs. After you install the software, it begins indexing your files. It only does this while your computer is idle, so no system resources are wasted while you're working. As soon as you tap your mouse or hit a key, the indexing stops, just like ending a screensaver. Google does not log this information or send it to its servers for cataloging or sell it to advertisers. All of the indexing is done locally. The interface is exactly like the Google web-search homepage, and all of the web-search's features are accessible from it.

There are several pros and cons to the Google Desktop software. First of all, it yields much faster results than the standard Windows search. You can specify what file-types you want to search, and what file-types or folders you want to omit from the search. Unfortunately, the software is only available for Windows systems. It also doesn't search all kinds of file-types, and doesn't have a lot of configurability. It is, however, still in beta testing, and it is already being tweaked to search for more different types of files.

You can learn more about the Google Desktop, and download the beta version for yourself, at http://desktop.google.com.

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