Google Desktop Search (GDS) and your Privacy.

Google Desktop Search (GDS) is a really cool tool that bring the power of Google powerful search algorithm right into your PC. With GDS you can search for files/words (and, even words/sentence(s) within a file) instead of using the built in search facility in your Windows PC. Apart from it’s searching capability you can also enrich it by downloading some other useful plugins and alerts (see picture >>) from http://desktop.google.com/plugins?hl=en, and if you will like to develop your own plugins and alerts, you can download the SDK from here http://desktop.google.com/developer.html . Google said you could use any language that supports COM and XML to develop your own plugins and alerts, and you can also embed GDS right into your own application; hmmm… super cool (I wish they could let developers “adsense” that way). If GDS is running when you open Google’s homepage you will seethe following menu: Web Images Groups News Desktop more »

Caveat:
GDS won’t work if you are using a proxy in your Internet connection setting in Internet Explorer except you tell Internet Explorer to exclude http://localhost:4664/ (this is the local address for GDS Server on my system and on most default installations).As with all technology, GDS has its own good/bad side (depending on your perspective on this), and this is its ability to grab screenshots of webpages. Now you don’t need a screen grabbing software, you can easily see all or part of any webpage and web based e-mail that might have been access on a system with GDS installed on it. Just search for a likely keyword that you know must have appeared on that webpage or inbox and GDS will gracefully display a screenshot of the webpage for you, (I leave the good and bad effect of that to your imagination). If you have nothing to hide I don’t think you should worry much about this, else…run.Some people also talk about the search index taking up all the available space on their system, am not sure this is possible, Google herself would have run out of storage space if that is the case (hope you catch my drift here). Am still doing some research on that though.

Conclusion:
Take GDS for a spin today and see if it lives up to the hype or not. GDS main rival right now is MSN Search Toolbar from Microsoft; I don’t really like it though, (too heavy).

NOTE:
GDS as at September 4, 2005 is still in beta stage.