Posted by : Anonymous on Oct 18, 2004 - 09:12 AM WebTechnology

Anyone who's spent hours struggling to find a missing document on a computer hard drive will love Google's new desktop search program. Most home computer users know how to locate a simply named document file, like ''vacation.doc.'' Finding a particular file with a favorite chicken soup recipe in it, or the e-mail with an important phone number in it is another story.
Google searches your hard drive for word documents, e-mail, instant messages, photographs, digital music files and even visited Web sites, all in seconds and mostly with amazing precision.

It doesn't search everything, though. In tests of the preview version, Web-based e-mail (including Google's own Gmail and Yahoo Mail) and Adobe PDF files were missed. Google says it does search some Web mail.

Several smaller companies have had desktop search software available for many months. But none of the competitors -- which include Copernic, X1 and Blinkx -- is a brand name, as is Google, nor are they all free. And none has Google's speed.

To add Google Desktop to your system:

* Go to desktop.google.com to download. (Caveat: It works only with Windows PCs, and accesses just the C: drive. External hard drives won't be monitored.) With the desktop feature added, the program searches your hard drive, in the background, to learn what information is there.

Google says it can take anywhere from an hour to two days to find and index everything, depending on the size of the hard drive. But it doesn't slow the system down while it looks.

* Users can query in two ways. A search from the main Google page produces synopsis results above Web results.

For instance, a search for ''Florida'' produced 21 e-mail mentions in a test, two news article headlines, then Web results.

By clicking the ''Desktop'' tab, (next to Images, Groups, News, etc.) you can scour just the hard drive, and see the e-mails, with the subject line and first sentence of each.

Be aware of privacy concerns. If you use instant-messaging software at work, and don't want that content residing on your hard drive, you'll want to adjust your Desktop settings.

With Desktop, Google ''caches'' your documents and other files, effectively taking a real-time photograph of everything you do.

Google gives you the option of tracking Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail, AOL Instant Messenger IM's, Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, plus Web history.

With Microsoft, America Online, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves all saying they also plan to offer desktop search, dealing with settings is something consumers should grow savvier about.

''This is the next step in searching, and everyone's going to be following Google's lead,'' says Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum advocacy group. ''This is going to be a social issue, not unique to Google. You'd better make sure your computer is secure.''

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