wow, just installed this last night. fantastic bit of kit!

search for anything, any word etc. on your hard drive and you get an instantaneous response (after an initial period where it spent time cataloguing the drive).

very impressed.

goodbye windows search facilty......

Does it have safe search?

er, what's that then?!

So that you can easily search your computer, the Google Desktop Search application indexes and stores versions of your files and other computer activity, such as email, chats, and web history. These versions may also be mixed with your Web search results to produce results pages for you that integrate relevant content from your computer and information from the Web. Your computer's content is not made accessible to Google or anyone else without your explicit permission

Yeah right.

Not for me......

don't use outlook, hardly ever use IM and web history is in smithereens after every browser session.

not too bothered but would be interested what other ppl think.

Just installed, use MSN and Outlook 2003 over exchange and it works there too. Just indexing at the moment and taking a bit. The only thing i am not sure about is because it index's it all, what happens when you receive a new email, is it auto added to the index or do you need to reindex?

Oh dear! Windows does this too - look for the "fastfind" icon in Control Panel on older versions, or on later versions look at Properties on your hard drive and see if "index contents to speed up searches" is checked. You will only want one lot of indexing running or your machine will be forever indexing stuff. Personally I don't bother - when I need to search for something I don't mind if it takes a little while, rather than my machine constantly slowing to a crawl while the indexing is taking place, to say nothing of the amount of space used for the indexes...

afaik, the google indexing only occurs when the computer is idle. i switched off windows indexing as it made my relatively low-spec computer very tardy.

does it work with lotus notes?

not yet - http://desktop.google.com/support can answer things like that. Just waiting for mozilla to become fully supported and im sure lotus notes will be.

Look out for the security hole in the Google Desktop

"The first flaw in Google's Desktop Search product has been discovered, and now fixed, according to the giant ad broker. The JavaScript vulnerability allowed third party websites to view the results of searches made on your local hard drive"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/10/21/google_desktop_security_vuln/

:thumbdwn:

One thing to point out though, it does state that google desktop is a Beta, therefore to be used at your own risk. But then it was recently said by someone that windows is the biggest beta test in history

coool

Bit wary of using it until any early problems are ironed out. Anyone that's using it now - have you noticed a hit on normal PC performance? I've had experiences of FastFind et al in the past and they haven't been pleasant!

But those are the two issues putting me off for now....

Steve

Mine is running on a 2.8GHz work pc which has, SETI, UDAgent, MSN, Outlook 2003, Google Desktop, Whatpulse and LookOut, and business management software running (usually word and excel too), and boots in literally seconds and runs perfectly. Only time you will notice a slight drop is during indexing, however it makes its best to use free resources only during this. Stick a decent firewall on if you think it may be a bit unsafe (however i would recommend having one on windows anyway )

This is a brilliant piece of kit for finding anything useful in a business environment. I usually have a customer querying and rather than find the email, i search for it in G.D. and it finds it in 0.02 seconds with the most recent at the top with the option to view in outlook. Such a great productivity tool, and i can imagine its good at home too... somewhere

Have a look at this -

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/000264.html