The amazing ease and speed you have come to know and expect with Google is now available for your own personal computer with the company’s new free Desktop Search tool.
Google Desktop search indexes the full text of:
The tool also provides simple image search capabilities by indexing the text within the file names of images in JPEG or GIF formats. File names of Adobe Acrobat PDF content as well as other file types are also indexed. Full text indexing of information in these files is not available, however. (Unlike with Gmail or regular Google searches, ads are not shown with desktop search results or content viewed through desktop search.)
Google Desktop Search is only available for Windows XP or Windows 2000 users. (Although the powers that be are planning a Mac version of Google Desktop Search, fundamental differences between the Windows and Macintosh operating systems will prevent one from being released anytime soon.)
Once installed, the application starts indexing information on your computer in the file types it understands. For the moment, only files on your primary hard drive (the C: drive for most people) can be indexed. External hard drives won't be searchable, however.
Indexing is fast and only happens when your computer is idle for 30 seconds or longer. Once the index is built, it is continually updated with changes on the fly, whenever you visit a new Web site or receive an e-mail. All of this information is automatically recorded and made searchable within seconds.
Awesome Automatic Caching
Each time you view something, a snapshot of what you've seen is created, and a copy of the page each time you visited it made. The "1 cached" link will change to reflect the number of copies recorded. As a result, the Google Desktop Search tool makes it easy to painlessly preserve your own archive of what you've seen, not unlike a "TiVO for the Web."
Also, Google Desktop Search provides can be a lifesaver, because the cached copies of your local files provide some automatic backup insurance. The data won't be in the original document format, and it can especially look weird, but some of what you grab may help.
SearchEngineWatch October 14, 2004
First of all, I love Google, as they are committed to excellence and focus on what they are good at. They clearly are one of the major success stories of the Internet, and they are my model for an excellent Web site: Committed to excellence, focused and providing an incredible service to us at no charge. Folks, believe me when I tell you that you simply must install this software. I can't tell you how much it has helped in the past few weeks since I have had it installed. When I am seeing patients I recall that there is something useful for this person that I have hidden somewhere on my computer. Sure enough I type it in the Google Desktop Search and in less than one second the program has found the missing piece of information. I would pay a few thousand dollars to have this powerful tool, but it is available to us for free. That it the beauty of Google's revenue model. They provide a free service for years and once they have enough users they determine a brilliant scheme that benefits everyone. Google adwords is a perfect example. It has revolutionized advertising in the 21st century and has made Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, billionaires many times over.
If you haven't installed Google Desktop yet, read why you should do so as soon as possible. You can download the Google Desktop from their website, and even with a dialup connection it should not take very long.
Like most of the things I do on the site, the only reward I receive from making this recommendation is the joy of having provided a service that will improve peoples' lives in some way.
It is a pattern I seek to live my life by, as I have found that the rewards for such an approach are profoundly amazing.
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