Somehow I ended up installing the Google Desktop Search thingy on my computer. To tell you the truth, I didn’t even know what it was when I installed it. But am I ever happy that I got it.
The Google Desktop Search thingy looks like this:
Or like this (depending on which version you choose):
And it sits …where else? on your desktop. In my case, it is down in the bottom right by the clock.
What it does is find stuff that is stored on your computer. All you have to do is type in your best guess of the name of the thing. For instance, I just used it to find the transcript of an recording that I did. I remember the guy’s name was Jim and that he talked about stress. For the life of me I couldn’t remember what I called the file and where I saved it.
But I typed “jim stress” into my little Google Desktop Search box and this is what I got:
What you can see is that it returned a normal looking Google results page, except at the top there is a listing of things on my computer with the words “jim stress” in them. If you look closely you’ll see that there are actually over 3000 items on my hard drive with the words “jim stress” in them. But lo and behold, my hero Google seemed to know that it was the transcript that I was looking for.
You can use Google Desktop to locate your files, emails, past IM chats, and web pages you’ve seen.
How does Google do this? When you look at a web page, read an email, or edit a file, Google Desktop indexes that item and copies the item’s content into your local cache, so that you’ll be able to find older versions of files and web pages.
Want to get Google Desktop Search on your own computer? It is available for both Windows and Mac, and you can download it here.
Note added June 26, 2007: A few readers have asked me about the privacy implications of the Google Desktop Search gadget. What’s important to understand is that Google isn’t breaking into your PC or your webmail accounts – they are simply scanning the INTERNET EXPLORER CACHE that already exists on your computer. Also, you can set up your “Preferences” for Google Desktop Search to exclude anything (e.g. email) that you don’t want Google to search.
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