Some time ago Google released an amazing new offer, the Google Desktop. This desktop did not take the world by storm; however those who take the time to check it out will not be disappointed.

If you have some disk-space to spare, this product is well worth trying. (This product builds full text indexes for all your data.)

You can bring the power of Google to your desktop.

The installation takes only a few minutes, however, once you have the software setup a background process will need to run to index your hard drive.

The amazing and wonderful thing is that the desktop client is a free download. This is amazing technology to get at no charge.

You know how powerful Google search is, we search the Internet with Google every day.

Imagine when you did a search, being told not only that there were 1,200,459,000 web pages that matched your search string. What if, in addition to this huge search result you were told that there were also 57 emails and three files in your local file system? Is it possible you could find this useful?

No more do you have to search around your file system looking for that directory you stored something important, well it was important at the time.

You can search with the speed and power of Google on your own PC. Use the system tray search box or you can hit escape twice to get a popup search in the center of your screen.

You have type ahead matching so you can often get your result before you have typed the whole word.

As stated earlier, after you install the product the system will index your hard drive while your PC is idle. This will take between 10 – 24 hours depending on how much data you have. Once it is completed however, you have a dynamically updated index, as you add new files they are indexed on the fly.

The system indexes all your key data, including email in outlook and outlook express, plus your web history.

Setup:

The installation takes only moments and you are asked during the install if you want to enable the advanced features.

This relates to the fact that some non-user specific information is sent back to Google. This information is sent back to Google while you are using the product to help ensure you get relevant content showing up and no doubt some targeted advertising.

You also have the ability to encrypt the indexes that will be built on your PC. This well provide you with additional security, however, this will have some impact on performance;

Once installed on your system, the software will begin to spider your hard disk. This can be done in the background over a day or two. You can also set the interface to be aggressive and let the computer run flat out.

Note: indexing 20GB of content ran overnight and produced 1.2 GB of index files.

Now that the index is there, the impact is minimal on processing and seems to be updated real time or close to it.

Other Features:

There are many more cool things to discuss which will be the focus of another article, these include portal type desktop helper applications like weather, and news feeds etc., a scratch-pad that remembers what you type and much more.

All other features aside, the search feature on its own is worth evaluating. You will not be disappointed.