The search engine giant Google (www.google.com) announced at the Digital Life conference in New York on October 14 the launch of a new desktop search software that will simultaneously search the Web and an array of files on a computer hard drive. Called Google Desktop Search (http://desktop.google.com), the software is a 400-kilobyte file that Microsoft Windows users can download to their computers. The software is accessible through a Web browser and the “Desktop” link that is automatically added to the Google home page www.google.com.
Once the software is installed, users can perform simultaneous searches for Web and desktop files directly from www.google.com, or they can limit the search to the desktop. The end result is a hard drive search that looks nearly identical to a typical Google Web search.
The Google Desktop Search software performs a one-time comprehensive index of a hard drive after installation and then updates the index any time a new file is created. The software can index the content of most common types of files, including Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Outlook e-mail messages. The software does have limitations, though. It cannot search across computer networks. It cannot search the text of PDF files. And, for now, it can only search e-mail messages from Outlook or Outlook Express.
The software, oddly enough, cannot even index messages from Gmail (http://gmail.google.com), Google's e-mail service. Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said that because Gmail is written in the JavaScript programming language the desktop software cannot access its files, and that engineers are working on an HTML version of Gmail that can work with the desktop searcher.
