Lightning-Quick Google Search Technology for Your PC

In the beginning there was the Internet, which spawned from relatively humble beginnings into a vast global information repository. Next came the search engine, which tried to help us to find specific information within the Internet's vastness, but often produced voluminous amounts of irrelevant data. Then came Google, which improved searching efficiency and produced more relevant results ... so much so that the word "Google" has become nearly synonymous with search and has taken its place in the lexicon alongside words like Band-Aid and Kleenex.

With its new Desktop Search utility, Google is hoping to improve the process of text-based searching on your computer the way it did on the World Wide Web. And though the amount of data on a PC is nothing compared to the enormity of the Web, searching for information on one's own computer can often be an exercise in frustration (and sometimes futility).

Only Popular OS and Applications Are Supported ... for Now

Google Desktop Search is a free download that requires either Windows XP or Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or later installed. The utility is still technically a beta version and is prominently labeled as such.

The type of software you use on your computer will determine whether Google Desktop Search will be able to search your system and how thorough those searches will be. It only supports certain versions of certain applications (albeit the most popular ones), so if you're the kind of person that eschews the software of the masses and instead uses, for example, Mozilla, StarOffice, Thunderbird, and Trillian as your day-today applications, you'll find Google Desktop Search to be of little if any use to you.

As far as browser support is concerned, Google Desktop Search works best with Internet Explorer version 5 or higher. In its current iteration, Google Desktop Search can only index Internet Explorer Web pages, so while you can access the utility with Mozilla or Firefox, you won't be able to search locally cached Web pages using those browsers.

Google Desktop Search will also index text files, Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files from Microsoft Office 2000 or higher, Outlook 2000+ and Outlook Express version 5+ e-mails, and AOL 7.0+ or AIM 5+ Instant Messenger chats. Google says it plans to expand the number of compatible applications and file formats in the future.

After installing Google Desktop Search, you're not quite ready to immediately start searching your computer because the utility must first index your computer's contents. It won't start indexing until your computer has been idle for a while, and will immediately cease indexing once you resume using the computer since (not surprisingly) the process can be rather disk-intensive. Fully indexing a system can take hours, and for this reason it's best to install Google Desktop Search just prior to being away from your system for an extended period of time.

We installed Google Desktop Search on a computer containing about two years worth of detritus, and within two hours the utility had indexed over 26,000 items, of which about 65% were e-mail messages. (Since chat sessions aren't cached by your PC the way Web pages are, you can only search chats that occur after the installation of Google Desktop Search.)

Google Desktop Search uses a browser-based interface for configuration and search-based tasks, and because the page actually points to the computer's loopback IP address (127.0.0.1), TCP/IP must be installed and functioning in order to use it. Users of proxy servers may also need to verify that local addresses bypass the proxy.

One-Stop Searching

There are a couple of different ways to interact with the utility. A desktop icon gets created automatically, and you can also access the utility via the Windows system tray. Launching the utility calls up a local Web page very similar to the standard Google main search page, except that after entering your search term, you can choose to search either the Web or your own computer.

Google Desktop Search also integrates itself with Google's regular Web search page. When you perform a Google search on a system with Google Desktop Search installed, it will automatically perform the search both on the Web and your computer, and the results for the latter are displayed prominently at the top of the results page. This might make it appear to some users that Google is creating a peer-to-peer search engine by incorporating results from user's computers into its Web searches, but the company insists that the information culled from Google Desktop Search isn't shared with Google or anyone else.

This integration with Google Web searches can be disabled, and Google Desktop Search offers a few other configurable options. Most notably, you can choose to exclude any of the file types discussed above or certain domain names or folder paths from the search index. You can also choose to exclude securely viewed Web sites from searches, since these pages often contain sensitive information.

We used Google Desktop Search to look for a particular word we knew had been used frequently on the computer in a variety of different communications. In less than a second (the result page actually claimed five hundredths of a second) Google Desktop Search produced two pages of results consisting of 10 e-mails, 2 Web pages, 3 Word documents, and a recent AIM chat session.

Finding those same 10 e-mails using Outlook 2002's search feature took over a minute. Locating the Word documents using Windows built-in search utility took several minutes, and there's no way to search for Web pages or chat sessions using built-in tools.

When you find a match and click on it, it will open in a browser window if it's a chat session or e-mail; for the latter you can also click a "View in Outlook" link to open the message in the e-mail program. Web page matches display a small thumbnail of the page, and files like Word documents are opened in the native application.

Potential for Privacy Abuse?

Users of Google's G-Mail service are undoubtedly aware that the price for the use of its free e-mail and generous storage limits is that users' e-mails are indexed and then adorned with advertisements tied to the contents of the message. There's no such catch with Google Desktop Search; search results don't contain any ads or sponsored links (yet?).

Before using Google Desktop Search, you should be aware of a few considerations. First, the utility doesn't currently support networked drives, so for now searching is limited to the confines of a single PC. Google Desktop Search also can only be installed under one user account, so it will only be available to that user. On a system with multiple user profiles, the utility won't index data created from other users' accounts, but if installed onto a computer with no login or where multiple users share a single login, Google Desktop Search's results will potentially include data created by anyone who used the system.

In fact, you might want to be mindful of the presence of Google Desktop Search if you ever use the computer of a friend or colleague or any public terminal, and certainly if you expect to share your own computer with other users. With the nearly instantaneous access to information provided by Google Desktop Search, privacy invasion and potential identity theft are legitimate concerns. (Check out our partner site's Google Takes a Risk commentary for more on Google Desktop Search's potential for good and bad.)

Still, there's no question that Google Desktop Search is far superior to any OS and application-specific search functions. And while there are third party applications that may search your PC contents almost as quickly as Google Desktop Search does, most don't offer the same convenience (some require you to perform individual searches for different file types), and perhaps just as important — they're not free.

Users of shared computers may want to think a bit before installing this utility, but if you use popular applications and your computer is yours and yours alone, Google Desktop Search will make searching your PC fast and easy.

Pros: Google search technology for your desktop computer, lightning-quick searches of multiple file types, free tool, integrates with Google Web site for 'super searching'

Cons: Doesn't support non-standard browsers, applications, or multiple users on one PC; privacy abuse and/or identity theft possible due to quick and easy access to potentially sensitive information

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