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Internet Monitor: Google Desktop Search

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17th Apr 2005
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After being in circulation for some time as a beta, the official version of Google's Desktop Search tool is now available as a free download.

While it's unlikely to be useful in an office or network environment, if you have a standalone PC with a big hard disk drive this could be just what you need to enable you to find things. This software indexes most data on your computer and enables you to locate things using keyword searches similar to those you normally perform on the Internet.

This final version will index Microsoft Office files, images, music files and videos, PDF documents, email in Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Netscape Mail, plus the history folders of Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

As the leading desktop search utility, the Google brand has quickly atttracted developers keen to add file types to the search facility. Plug-ins are currently available for a diverse range of file types, from C++ to OpenOffice and StarOffice.

After the initial indexing of your entire PC - which can take hours if you have loads of stuff on your hard drive - the software works invisibly in the background updating the index as data is added. Users report little impact on their PC's performance while running this software. However, you do need at least 500MB of free disk space to allow the indexing to run smoothly!

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By brianroden
28th Apr 2005 16:36

Network Desktop Search
I use Copernic which is excellent and searches both my local disk and the netork disc.

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By Simon Sweetman
21st Apr 2005 12:45

desktop search
As a sole practitioner with a standalone PC I've been using this for several months now. I've found things I thought had been lost for years! For the not as well organised as they should be (is that most of us ?) it's brilliant !

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By timneale
21st Apr 2005 12:57

Network drives?
Does anyone know if you can have this on your PC but also have the software catalogue the network server (mapped to your PC as an F drive, for example)? Obviously the content of this drive will continually change, and not through actions from your PC.

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