Imagine being able to search all your e-mails (in my case, over 5 years worth!) and files on your computer in just seconds, and with one click of your mouse open the file or e-mail you were specifically looking for. With this incredible tool you can do that and more, and, the best part —it is totally, 100% FREE!

If you have ever tried to find a specific file on your computer you know how frustrating and time consuming it can be. Thanks to a great innovation from our friends at Google, those days are over!

Google Desktop Search (GDS) is a free program you can download and install on your computer(s) in just minutes. Once installed, it will begin indexing the entire contents of your machine's hard drives. This one-time step may take several hours depending upon the number of files you have and how much you use your computer during the process (it only indexes when your machine is idle). Once this initial indexing is done, GDS will silently keep the index up-to-date as you add, modify, and delete files and e-mails.

GDS makes it easy to access its desktop search function by enabling you to put a search either on your desktop or on your Windows taskbar.

Search Capability Extraordinaire

First of all, GDS is FAST! I have over 220,000 files and e-mails on my computer and it returned a search in 3.42 seconds! It is versatile too. When you do a standard Google Web search with GDS installed it will return search results that include whatever is on your computer as well as the Web that meets the search criteria.

Perhaps one of the most powerful and useful aspects of GDS is that it will index all of your e-mails (Outlook or Outlook Express). Now here's a trick not many people know about. If you open your Outlook archive files, GDS will index them as well. This means you can now do searches for e-mails that may be years old! (NOTE: You only need to open the archive files long enough to be indexed, they don't need to remain open when doing searches on them.)

For example, I make a habit of archiving all my e-mails into previous calendar years (see file screenshot below).

As you can see I have saved a lot of e-mails. In fact, the "archive_2000.pst" file contains e-mails going back to 1997. By taking this approach I now have instant access to the nearly 56,000 e-mails stored on my computer. And, they can be searched by who they were sent to/from, their subject line, the body copy and even the names of attached files. The amount of time this saves you when looking for that one "critical" e-mail (or whole series of them) is incredible!

Currently GDS indexes most major Microsoft Office file types, PDFs, text and media files. The folks at Google were smart enough however to encourage 3rd party programmers to create additional "plugins" to GDS that can greatly extend its searching capabilities. For example, one will enable you to search contents of ZIP files.

Desktop Search is turning into big business, so expect other players (i.e. Microsoft, Yahoo!, etc.) to jump into the fray.  Google has a great headstart however, and they are likely to keep the lead in this increasingly innovative arena. After all, they were the ones who revolutionized Web search as we know it today!