Search giant Google Monday announced the release of Google Desktop Search 1.0, marking the official release of the company's desktop search product that has been in open beta testing since
October.
Users can search the files on their hard drives, including word documents, e-mails, AOL instant messenger chat sessions, recently viewed Web pages, and audio, video, PDF, and
photo files.
The release version incorporates a slew of new features, including application programming interfaces for developers who can write software plug-ins for programs so that the
desktop search will index the data contained in saved files. So far, plug-ins have been written to allow users to search Trillian chat files and the full text of scanned images like faxes, among
others. The search tool can also be used to search for deleted or lost files.
With its release, Google becomes the first of the major search players to formally launch a desktop search
product, but Yahoo!, AskJeeves, and MSN all currently offer beta versions of desktop search.
When it was first released in beta in October, Google was the first among the major search
companies to offer this service. With the release of the 1.0 version, Google has effectively beat Microsoft--along with all the other players in search--to the punch, since "integrated search" of both
Web pages and desktop contents is one of the major features promised for the 2006 release of Longhorn, the long-awaited new version of the Windows operating system.
Google's desktop
search also offers a "floating" toolbar, which users can program to appear on their desktop over Windows-based programs, allowing easier access to the search window. Google also has revamped some
features that raised security concerns for some, such as the indexing of password-protected files. The desktop searcher no longer indexes such protected files.