Google Desktop – Loaded Search Tool for Your PC and More
Actually, I had no intent to write about Google Desktop for at least like a month, as I was still sort of testing it out. But my connection went unexpectedly down for a whole night on sunday little after I woke up. And this was, after I had slept for a whole day recovering from saturday night partying. Anyways, I was full of energy and needed to write about something, so I went through my installed programs and Google Desktop seemed like a good candidate for an offline post. So here is it.
Google Desktop is another service from mighty Google which is 100% free and offers a bunch of cool features. There are two main things to Google Desktop; firstly and most importantly is its desktop search application which lets you easily find any information on your computer, and secondly is its Sidebar, using which you can integrate varity of web services like your gmail account,google calendar,personalized news,RSS/Atom feeds from favourite sites and much more right into your desktop. Lets quickly go though these 2 features below.
1. Desktop Search Feature:
Desktop search is a main feature of Google Desktop, it lets you easily locate any stored information on your PC. Within a matter seconds you can easily search through your emails, files, music, photos, chat logs, gmail account, recently visited web pages much more. Think of it as Google Search for your PC, which runs as fast and conveniently categorizes results based on where they were found(emails, files, chat history, web history and etc). After installing google desktop you don’t really need to bother any more organizing your emails, bookmarks and other files.
You can access it either through sidebar(see pic below) or by double clicking ‘Ctrl’ button. Google Desktop Search is far better alternative to standard windows XP(and earlier versions) search functionality which is quite handicapped.
2. Google Desktop Sidebar:
Another feature of Google Desktop is Sidebar(image above), it lets you integrate variety of services from various websites right into your desktop. These integrable mini-programs are known as Google Desktop Gadgets. These gadgets include items ranging from regular things like gmail account, stock prices, personalized news and games to more specific ones like countdown timer, laptop battery life meter,quote of the day and torrent search tool.
For instance, some of the gadgets on my taskbar include popular stuff from google videos, countdown timer, daily items from my Google Calendar account, Top Digg Stories of the day, To-Do lists and Scratch Pad.
Some additional features overview:
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Some things to consider before installing:
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Overall, I am quite happy with Google Desktop, and do not see myself uninstalling it anytime soon. Google desktop can be downloaded either as tool included in google pack from here, or as stand-alone application from here.
Want more? Check out other reviewed Google products tand services.
stay tuned.
Cannot get generic countdown to work. This is the one you put your own date and picture on. I wanted it to count down to 9/25/07 and it just sits on 00.
As far as I can remember there were several countdown gadgets. I would suggest to try couple of other ones. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which one I used to have, but it definitely worked fine.
I use two accounts on my computer for working reasons and would like to access my google sidebar configuration already all set in on of my accounts by just opening it in the other account. Is this possible at all? I can’t find how to do it.
Thanks,
Rodrigo.