Google Enters Desktop Search Fight

Just as the lines are being drawn in the impending search wars, Google has fired the first shot and today launched a bold assault on the competition. Google has unveiled a long awaited beta of its desktop search engine technology.

Called Google Desktop Search, the software enables users to find files that are stored on their own computers in the same way they would retrieve data from the Web. The beta release comes just one day after BetaNews first reported that America Online had assembled its own desktop search.

In an effort to entrench itself deep within the market early on, Google has taken its Internet prowess and applied it to the desktop - literally meaning that the same technology that powers Google.com powers Google Desktop Search. Google claims that its Web search engine can sift through billions of Web pages within a fraction of a second; so a single computer hard drive would be a task less daunting, producing even faster search results.

At the present time, the software is limited to finding common file types including Microsoft Office file extensions, plain text, chat logs as well as e-mails and AOL Instant Messenger chat logs. While those files may be stored locally, Google goes not make a distinction between that condition and the Web: Its software enables users to search both the Internet and their computer simultaneously.

That said, when users query the Web through either the Google Toolbar or the Google.com homepage Google Desktop Search runs in parallel and adds those results to the Google.com search results. Local searches are updated continuously throughout the course of a day for most file types to return the most relevant and timely results from a single starting point, on or offline.

"On the surface, Google’s desktop search utility appears to be about the desktop PC. It’s much bigger, because Google brings the desktop search capability into the same browser where people search the Web--and provides information simultaneously from both locales. Google essentially is blurring the informational divide between desktop and Web information, which is a smart approach that should concern Microsoft," wrote senior Jupiter Analyst Joe Wilcox.

Answering the privacy question, Google claims that the contents of a user's drive will not be exposed onto the Web without the user's permission. In addition, users can set preferences that assemble exclusion lists for files they do not want to have searched. The list of files is expected to grow as Google extends the software's reach into other file formats by offering developers an Application Programming Interface (API) to make their files more searchable.

Google is not alone in its hopes to merge the gap between the desktop and the Web. Recently, Microsoft previewed a prototype desktop search technology that was integrated into the MSN Toolbar add-on for Internet Explorer. As first reported by BetaNews, America Online is adding similar functionality to its AOL Browser product test bed.

Google Desktop Search is free and may be downloaded via FileForum . Requirements are: Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 3, 128 MB of RAM and at least a 400MHz processor. The current release is only available in the English language.