Deep File Divers

Google Desktop Search

Google's Web search power comes to your personal data with this program. Because it runs in a browser (mostly), it feels like the same old Google. You can place the utility's search box in your taskbar or on your desktop, and from there use it to search the Web as well as your local files.

Google Desktop Search works with Microsoft Office, music, image, and other common file types, and it even searches your AOL Instant Message chats. Surprisingly, it omits Rich Text Format, compressed, XML, and other popular file types, although you can download plug-ins to search for these and other files.

In our tests the program found most of the file types it supports, including Thunderbird mail. Oddly, it found one image file based on the file's metadata, but it couldn't find another similar file. The same problem occurred with our MP3 tests: one hit, one miss. Google Desktop Search also failed to find files that had our search term only in their name, a task it should have performed easily.

Don't look for a preview pane with your googled results (although you do get an excerpt of the file with your search term in context). Instead you'll see the familiar Google search page in your browser with links that launch the files in the associated application. One exception is image files; the results page includes a thumbnail of the found image next to its listing.

After you install the tool, you may be surprised to see your local files included in the results of your Google Web searches. Fortunately, the local files are in a separate section at the top of the results page. Google insists that your local information isn't sent to anybody over the Web. Still, for peace of mind you can turn off this feature on the Preferences page (see FIGURE 6).

You are not offered any choice in Google Desktop Search as to the drive or folder in which your index will be stored. Nor can you specify the folders to index, although you can indicate the URLs and folders the indexing should avoid. This means that if you have only one folder out of a dozen you'll ever want to search, you may have to do a lot of typing of file paths to designate the folders Google should skip--or just live with Google taking up extra processing time and disk space. There is also no way to schedule when indexing occurs, but you can pause the index process if it's slowing your machine while you work.

For more information about the beta release of the upcoming Google Desktop 2, see "First Look: Google Grabs Space on Your Desktop."