Google offers Black Box for your personal computer

Google showed the world what great searching could look like: incredibly fast, blessedly simple, attractively designed. Unfortunately, it could only search the Web. To search your own files, you had to turn, reluctantly, back to Windows.

No longer. Last week, Google took the wraps off its latest invention: Google Desktop Search. As the name implies, it’s software that applies the famous Google search technology to the stuff on your own hard drive. It’s free, it’s available right now for Windows XP and 2000 (desktop.google.com), and it’s terrific.

Like the Windows search program, Google Desktop can find files by name, including photos, music files and so on. But it can also search for words inside your files, including Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. That’s a relief when you can’t remember what you named a file, but you do remember what it was about (Windows offers this feature, too, but it’s hard to find, hard to turn on and poorly documented.)

For its final trick, Google Desktop does something so profound it may change the way you think about your PC forever: It can search any Web page you’ve ever seen, any e-mail message you’ve opened and the transcript of any instant-message chat you’ve had.

Why is this such a life-changing feature? Because using a computer these days means being bombarded with far too much information to remember. Google Desktop effectively becomes a sort of aircraft black box for your PC—a photographic memory, as Google puts it. The program can recall any bit of text that ever passed in front of your eyeballs, in a fraction of a second. You don’t even have to remember where you read something (e-mail, Web, instant message, document); you have to remember only what it was about. This feature, as they say in Silicon Valley, is huge. ‘‘All right,’’ you’re probably thinking, ‘‘down, boy. There’s got to be a catch.’’ No, there are no catches. There is, however, a long list of footnotes.

Google Desktop is officially in beta testing, meaning Google doesn’t consider it to be finished. At this point, it can’t search Acrobat (PDF) files except by file name. It can’t search Web pages you’ve visited unless Internet Explorer is your browser, chat sessions unless you use AOL Instant Messenger, or e-mail unless you use Outlook or Outlook Express. If you don’t use these programs, Google Desktop will seem a lot less essential.

Another consideration: Google Desktop Search is remarkable in the compactness of its code – the entire program fits in a 446-kilobyte download – but installing it requires at least one gigabyte of free hard-drive space. — NYT