Google mp3 search

Google Desktop beta

Google's search engine faces the daunting task of indexing over 4 billion Web pages and sharing the results with practically every Internet user. Google Desktop has a much easier job: It indexes your local data to provide fast Google-style local searching.

Immediately after you install Google Desktop (it requires either Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 or later or Windows XP) and set initial preferences, it will begin indexing existing files on all local drives and mapped network drives. Google Desktop can index Word, Excel, PowerPoint and text documents. For certain other file types (for example, images and MP3 files) it will index the filename only. It doesn't index PDF file contents and won't peek inside ZIP archives. The product also tracks and indexes Outlook or Outlook Express e-mail messages, AIM conversations, and Internet Explorer's History log. That Web history includes your actual IE History and Favorites lists, as well as all sites you visit while Google Desktop is running. You can optionally direct it to not save secure (https://) sites. And you can suppress indexing of particular drives or folders.

On our test system, indexing around 4,500 messages and 10,000 files took about two hours, and the index occupied 100MB on the hard drive. We would have liked to see a progress bar or other indication of remaining indexing time. The index is completely local; nothing at all goes out to Google without your permission. With your consent, it will share nonpersonal information like how many searches you've made and how long they took.

Searching is just like using Google online, with a few exceptions. You can use quoted strings or combine terms with OR, and you can prefix a term with a minus sign to choose results not containing that term. You can use the "site:" or "filetype:" prefixes to choose results from a specific Web site or of a specific file type. Google.com supports word stemming and whole-word wildcards; Google Desktop does not. And you can't search a specific field, like the To/From fields in e-mail messages.

By default, the newest results appear first; you can choose to sort by relevance instead. Results come ten to a page, and there is no preference setting for more, but you can get around that: Add "&num=100" (no quotes) to the URL after the initial search and click Go. Each result includes a short snippet of content showing the keywords, just like the results at Google.com. For each result type, Google Desktop displays links to appropriate actions. Clicking a found document opens it. You can expand e-mail conversations to view all messages and can Reply or Forward with a single click. IM conversations include a link to send an instant message. And Web History items include a URL link as well as (in most cases) a thumbnail of the page.

Google Desktop not only indexes documents, it caches file content each time you save the file. A search that turns up a DOC file can include links to many cached versions, allowing you to go back to an earlier version. Deleting a file doesn't remove it from the cache. On one hand, that means you may be able to recover a deleted file. On the other hand, the index will grow indefinitely, and the only way to renew it totally is to uninstall and reinstall Google Desktop. Note, too, that it doesn't index the entirety of very long documents.

When you make an ordinary Web search at Google.com, Google Desktop gets a chance to run the same search locally. Its local results appear at the top of the results page flagged with a Google Desktop icon. These results don't go through Google.com, and you can click a link to hide them from nosy coworkers.

If you rely on Google for Web searching, Google Desktop will be your new best friend. It indexes local files and emails, logs and indexes your AIM chats and visited Web pages, and can even recover content from deleted or modified documents. It does not, however, provide the detailed field-based search available in Lookout for Outlook.

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