Google’s New Desktop Search Tool

Mary C. | 16 October 2004 |

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Search Engine News - Google’s New Desktop Search Tool
Russ Cabe, Promotion Department Manager - Blizzard Internet Marketing

On October 14, 2004, Google released a test version of their Google Desktop Search, an application that searches through personal files and Web history stored locally on a PC. Their unveiling comes just before rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online anticipate releases of similar desktop search applications.

How it works
Downloading is easy and found at Google’s home page. Once downloaded, the software then takes about an hour to scan the hard drive and to index the full text of Word, Outlook e-mail, Excel files, text files, AOL chat logs, and saved Web pages from Internet Explorer. Then as the application runs, it indexes new documents and visited Web pages in real time.
When users visit Google’s home page again, they’ll see an added search tab called “desktop”. When terms are typed in the search box, Google will return a list of Web results as well as the user’s previously viewed Web pages, e-mail, or Word documents by viewing the results through this new “desktop” tab. Users can sort desktop results by date or file type. They can also set preferences to block certain files from being indexed or seen in search results.

Privacy Issues
In terms of privacy and according to Google, this new application resides on the user’s hard drive and does not share indexed data from the desktop with Google. What it does do, like most applications, is send a daily "ping" to Google’s servers with information on the health of the application (for instance, whether it has crashed) and usage data so that Google can tell how people are using features.

Google’s privacy policy is posted as follows:
“Google is committed to making search on your desktop as easy as searching the web. We recognize that privacy is an important issue, so we designed and built Google Desktop Search with respect for your privacy. So that you can easily search your computer, the Google Desktop Search application indexes and stores versions of your files and other computer activity, such as email, chats, and web history. These versions may also be mixed with your Web search results to produce results pages for you that integrate relevant content from your computer and information from the Web. Your computer’s content is not made accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit permission.”

Summary
While we don’t suspect that this new application has anything to do with the recent massive indexing, one thing is for sure, Google is at the fore-front with this new technology, and we think it will stick around for a long time. While it’s still in beta testing, we like the tool for its simplicity, remarkable power and seamless blend into Google. Advertisements are not showing up yet…but speculation exists for Google Ad Words user’s ads to soon appear!!