Google Desktop Search: Lightning-Quick Searches for Your PC Lightning-Quick Google Search Technology for Your PC Joseph Moran
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.
