Yahoo!'s still the king of desktop search but Google Desktop 2.0's sidebar offers a compelling new way to navigate both your own computer and the Internet.Google surprised everyone in 2004 with the release of Google Desktop Beta, a desktop application that let computer users search the contents of their PCs as easily as they searched the Web. Google ups the ante with Google Desktop 2.0 Beta, a significant upgrade that includes a heavily customizable sidebar for bringing Internet content straight to your PC, along with better filtering for searching your photos, e-mail, and documents. We gave the latest version a whirl to see if the improvements are as good as the company claims.
Google Desktop 2.0 installs quickly. Indexing your system, however, takes quite a bit longer, and happens, at least initially, while your system is idle. So while you can get started with the Google Sidebar right away, your computer will need an hour or two of alone time (with you not working on the system) to index your system before you can run local searches. After that, Google updates the index in the background as you're working, so Web sites you visit and e-mails you receive are available almost instantly for searches. On our admittedly fast AMD Athlon 64 3500+ test machine with 1GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM SATA drive, we didn't notice much of a performance hit. CPU usage fluctuated between 2 percent and 8 percent while the machine was at idle. The same system showed fluctuations between 0 percent and 5 percent at idle without Google Desktop loaded.
Version 2.0 can search across old MSN Messenger and AOL Instant Message chats. In addition, the entire search index can now be encrypted using the Microsoft Windows Encrypted File System (EFS) under Windows XP Professional. As before, Google Desktop works with both Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, something MSN Desktop Search still can't boast.
The default sidebar—more or less a series of stacked windows that pop up over your task tray—contains a number of useful items, such as an e-mail box that can work with Gmail, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client you choose, news from sources such as Forbes and Business Week, a scratch pad, a continuously cycling thumbnail window that displays photos from your "My Pictures" folder, and a weather outlook for your zip code. The Web Clips window automatically picked up RSS feeds from Web sites that we had recently visited. (You can turn off autocapture.) Finally, the ubiquitous Google search box resides at the bottom of the sidebar. You can also bypass the sidebar interface in favor of two smaller, search-box-only options: the Deskbar, which stays in your taskbar, and the Floating Deskbar, which you can place anywhere on your desktop.
As you type characters in the search box, results begin appearing in a pop-up window. You can filter the results by clicking on "Web pages," "e-mail," and the like, and it will bring up the appropriate results page. These look just like Google search pages, so the interface is familiar. Clicking on an Outlook e-mail brings up the contents of the e-mail in the browser. It doesn't fire up the Outlook application, which means you can read the results instantly (even if the formatting looks slightly different in the browser window from how it would look in an actual Outlook window). You still have the option, however, of viewing the message in Outlook. Also, if you use Google Desktop 2.0's integrated Outlook toolbar, you can search for e-mail and read the contents directly in Outlook. As with Yahoo! Desktop Search's integrated Outlook searchbar, Google's search results are not real-time and can only be launched by hitting Enter.
If you're a news hound, you can enlarge the Web clips and news feed portions of the sidebar, and minimize something else you're not as interested in (e.g. stock quotes), or vice versa. Unfortunately, although Google Desktop adjusts the news items it shows you based on your surfing habits, there's no way to configure them yourself. In addition, recent e-mails (from Gmail, Outlook, and so on) appear in the sidebar. In our tests, Google Desktop was able to find recently received Outlook messages within seconds of their appearance in our inbox, matching the company's claims.
Read the full story on pcmag.com: Google Desktop 2.0 (Beta)
