Product Reviews

Although still at the beta stage, Google's Desktop Search is now at its third version. Fortunately, it's still free from Google's website. The basic principle is the same: Desktop Search makes searching your PC as quick and easy as searching the internet.

You can do this in several ways. First, Google's home page includes a link to your desktop PC. Just type in your search term and you can filter your search results by emails, files and web history. It's very quick and accurate, but the simple filter terms aren't as good as those on Microsoft's Desktop Search, which also lets you filter images and audio files.

Google has worked hard to bring its search to other parts of your PC. First, Outlook gains a Google search bar, so you can find emails quickly. It's much faster and more accurate than Outlook's built-in search, but you can't start scrolling through the results until the search has completely finished, which is quite annoying.

One of the best things about this application is the number of plug-ins available. Google Desktop can't search your Outlook Express email by default, but by downloading plug-ins, you can increase the number of files and applications it can search, including Outlook Express files. There's even a plug-in that lets you search for picture and MP3

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files, bringing Desktop Search in line with its competitors.

Perhaps the best way to interact with Desktop Search is through the Sidebar, which takes up permanent residence on your desktop. This contains various panels, each with its own purpose. So you can have panels for built-in weather reports, an email tracker, access to Google maps and a Scratch Pad for taking notes.

The Sidebar offers a much wider range of facilities now than it did when it was first introduced in the second version of Desktop Search. It has also seen some improvements, such as support for UK cities in the Weather bar.

Google Talk was available in the last version of the software, but Google has improved its integration. You can now right-click any entry on the Sidebar, such as the current weather report, and send the information to one of your online buddies. This works really well, and is hampered only by the limited availability of Google Talk. To register with the service you need a Google Mail account and you can't get one of these unless you're invited to join the service by another account holder.

As well as expanding the desktop search engine by downloading plug-ins, you can extend the Sidebar with new panels. A healthy number of developers are making these, and we've downloaded a range of new updates. Our current favourites are a To Do list, iTunes controller, the TimeWarp clock and the System Monitor, which lets us keep an eye on how well our PC is performing. All these extra sidebars are free, quick to download and very easy to install. The only limit to how many you can download is your screen's resolution: at 1,280x1,024 we found that nine panels were about the limit before they became too small to use easily.

Simple to use and with hundreds of extra plug-ins available, Google's Desktop Search 3 is a powerful application that all PC owners should install.