Google Desktop is a free downloadable application that offers an easy way to search for information on your computer, across your personal computer network and from the web. It includes full text search over your primary computer’s email, files, music, photos, chats and web pages you’ve viewed. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize it. Searching your computer is now as easy as searching the web with Google.

Google Desktop also gives you one-glance access to personalized and up-to-the-minute information from the web with Sidebar and Google Gadgets, which can be placed anywhere on your desktop to show you new email, weather, stock information, photos, personalized news, RSS/Atom feeds, and more. Sidebar is personalized automatically, with no manual configuration required (though you can make customizations if you like.)

New features
• You can now customize your desktop with Google Gadgets, visually appealing interactive mini-applications of any shape and size that can be anything from games to weather globes to media players.
• You can also save your gadget content and settings online in order to protect your info from computer crashes and access it from other computers by signing into your Google Account with Google Desktop. For instance, you can now ‘synch’ the To Do list on both your laptop and your desktop.
• Google Desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized Google homepage for you based on the subjects you’re most interested in. For example, if you’re constantly doing searches on new movies, Google Desktop can suggest a movies gadget for your desktop.
• We’ve also integrated Google Desktop more fully with the rest of Google. For instance, you can now add some Google Gadgets from your personalized homepage to your Sidebar, or anywhere else on your desktop. You can also view upcoming birthdays with the orkut gadget, see what’s popular on Google Videos, or access your Google Calendar right from your desktop.

Plus
• Improved indexing – When you move files, Google Desktop now updates your index more quickly and accurately. You can also manually re-index your computer by clicking the Google Desktop icon in the taskbar and selecting “Re-Index.”
• Easily add content to your web clips gadget – This improved gadget now allows you to stay up to date on subjects you’re interested in by easily searching and adding web clips.
• Removing deleted files from search results – Some users like the fact that Google Desktop saves cached versions of deleted files in case they need to retrieve them. But we know this isn’t for everyone. Don’t wantto see deleted files in your search results? Just enable the “remove deleted items” option in your Desktop preferences

Download pdf Google Desktop 4 (beta) Reviewer’s Guide