Google Desktop Search: Lightning-Quick Searches for Your PC One-Stop Searching ... But At What Cost? Joseph Moran
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, supports Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird and Netscape browsers and mail clients, PDF support, integrates with Google Web site for 'super searching'
Cons: Doesn't support Opera and other alternative browsers, doesn't support multiple users on one PC; privacy abuse and/or identity theft possible due to quick and easy access to potentially sensitive information
