In the time in which Google has gone from a background service for Yahoo and other web portals to becoming so popular that the company went public, the Google search concept has become an integral part of the online experience. One of the next offerings from Google is going to be a desktop search tool. Imagine being able to do a Google-style search on all of the data stores on your computer: word processing files, spreadsheet files, database files, email stores, AOL chat logs, saved web pages, etc. The current versions of Windows offer a simple search feature from the Start menu, but it’s pretty limited. The Google Desktop Search software is a downloadable 400k file which will scan the computer’s hard drive for all of the file types which it is able to read and index them into a local database on the hard drive. This scanning procedure can take upwards of five to six hours. As the application runs in the future, it scans new files and adds them to the index. When the user wants to find a file, but can’t remember the location, or when the user wants to search for every instance of a word or phrase, the Google Desktop Search tool can find the files for the user wherever they are on the hard drive. Microsoft has just announced that they will be offering a desktop search tool by the end of 2004. In addition to Google and Microsoft, Yahoo!, AOL, and AskJeeves have all made overtures to offering their own version of desktop search.
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