Google long ago established itself as the world's most popular Internet search site. Now the company wants to extend its dominance to the exploding marketplace of disk indexers, utilities that allow you to find quickly data stored on your local PC.

Google Desktop is a free utility that can be downloaded from the company's Web site (www.google.com). Downloading and installing the half-megabyte program takes only a few minutes. After that, however, be prepared to dedicate a much longer time to Google Desktop's initial indexing of virtually every file on your hard drive.

How long the process will take depends on how many files this entails, but Google's indexing phase required noticeably longer on our test system than competitors like Copernic and Blinkx. Once your drive is indexed, however, Google Desktop can find specified data with the same blinding speed that has made the Internet-based Google the target site of literally hundreds of millions of users, daily.

Google Desktop resembles its Internet-based counterpart in other ways, as well. Search results are displayed in your browser on a single Web page, with a link provided to each occurrence that allows you to open the corresponding file, using its associated application, with a single mouse click. This process mirrors precisely the steps used to navigate search results on the familiar Google Web site.

Unfortunately, Google Desktop can't rank search results with the same elegance it does Internet searches. That process relies on surveying large numbers of global searches to determine the priority and applicability of specific sites to detailed search parameters. Instead, Google Desktop sorts local results by date.

There is a "Sort by Relevance" link in the upper right corner that will sort your results based primarily on how many times and when you've accessed a given file. In its defense, Desktop uses the same procedures as do all disk indexers do, in this regard.

Google Desktop would be the ideal disk indexer, were it not for one peculiar programming idiosyncrasy. Because it's based on the company's Internet offering, Google decided to empower its Desktop utility by installing on the local computer a fully functional Web server; this approach allowed Google to incorporate into Desktop much of the same algorithms that have made it so popular as an Internet-based search engine.

Although unlikely, it's not unthinkable to imagine a situation where this local server could be compromised by hackers to gain access to data stored on your local disks. Yes, the threat is minor, but it does exist and should be considered by anyone considering installing Google Desktop.


Pro: Personal search engine from the premier Web-based search company.
Con: Still slow in beta stage; creates a Web server on your PC, which could cause security problems.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View CA 94043
phone: (650) 623-4000
www.google.com