Google is offering a test version of an application
designed to let users search for information stored on their
desktop computers.
Google Desktop Search will let users search for information
stored in their PC files, local e-mail inboxes, archived chat
sessions and list of websites visited.
Considerable progress has been made in recent years in internet
search, as sites from companies such as Google, Ask Jeeves and
Yahoo improved their technology to index more content and deliver
more relevant results.
But finding information in users' desktop PCs has been hampered
by a lack of efficient tools to do this.
Although there are companies that already provide desktop search
tools, Google now rises to the top of the pile by virtue of the
volume of users it commands, Gartner analyst Allen Weiner said.
"You have to put Google in the lead by sheer numbers. Its position
in the marketplace puts it ahead by default because of the number
of users it has."
Google Desktop Search can be downloaded for free. The
application can search for information stored in users' Outlook and
Outlook Express e-mail applications from Microsoft, in Microsoft
Office files from applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint,
in the list of visited websites kept in Microsoft's Internet
Explorer and across stored instant message chat sessions from
America Online's AIM service.
Google Desktop Search is also integrated with the Google.com
internet search engine, so that queries run through Google.com are
also run simultaneously in a user's Google Desktop Search
application. Results from Google Desktop Search are added to the
Google.com results.
However, for the sake of privacy, the desktop results are not
made available to Google.com without the user's permission, said
Google. Users can also configure Google Desktop Search to search
certain files and not others.
Google Desktop Search has been designed to refresh its index of
local desktop files continuously so that it can search e-mail
messages seconds after they are received and files seconds after
they are created, Google said.
"Users don't really have an understanding any longer about
what's on their hard drive and what's on the network," said Marissa
Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products. They remember a
piece of information but often they cannot recall whether they saw
it in a Word document, a web page, an e-mail message or an AIM
chat, she said.
"The theory is: if you've seen it on your screen, you should be
able to search for it and find it again quickly."
In this way, Google Desktop will in fact index e-mail messages a
user views from his web mail account, even when those messages
aren't physically stored in the user's hard drive, Mayer said.
While wmail services from competitors Yahoo and Microsoft are
supported in this fashion by Google Desktop, Google's own web mail
service Gmail ironically is currently off limits. The problem?
Gmail's extensive and sophisticated use of JavaScript, Mayer
said.
Google Desktop Search can find multimedia and PDF (Portable
Document Format) files based on their file names, she said.
It doesn't currently search the metadata of multimedia files,
such as images, MP3s and video clips, nor does it index the full
text of PDF files. That support is expected to be added in the
future, along with the ability to index instant messaging chats
from services other than AIM, she said.
When a user only searches his desktop using the application, no
sponsored search ads are served up, she said. However, when the
user searches both his desktop and the internet, the results from
both searches are combined and sponsored ads accompany the query
results.
No information from the user's desktop is transmitted to Google;
the ads are triggered only by the query term or terms.
Google Desktop Search is available now for Windows XP and
Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above. It is available in English
now, and there are plans to support other languages in the
future.
Juan Carlos Perez writes for IDG News Service