Google has released a new version of its desktop search / sidebar suite. Google Desktop 3 has some cool new features:
- Undock panels: any panel can be removed from the sidebar and placed anywhere on the desktop. Windows Vista’s sidebar can do this, so it was almost a requirement. Panels can be made to be always on top, in a per-panel setting, so you can pick a specific one to just show it over everything else if its really convenient.
- Send to friend: you can right click on any information in the sidebar to send it to one of your contacts instantly. You can send it to their email (any email address), Google Talk, or to the same panel on their sidebar (with a “Sent from Joe” message).
- Spell checker: when searching, live search now offers spelling suggestions, offering corrections as you type
- Lock search: You can lock desktop search, and no one will be able to use it until you unlock it with a password,
- Search operators: “under:” searches only files under a specific subdirectory. “machine:” restricts searches to a particular computer.
- New advanced search page, with options to chose to search specific areas of desktop search (emails, files, history, chats), who something is addressed to or from, date range, and choose certain machines for your search.
- Search across computers: install Desktop 3 on multiple machines and link them together so you can search all the machines at once from any machine. You can specify only certain folder to be searchable. Your index is copied to Google’s servers, and you can request that the data on those servers be deleted at any time.
- Now indexes ZIP files
Desktop 3 is 99kb larger than Desktop 2. Not bad!
Other coverage:
Google Desktop blog announcement
Michael Arrington saw it coming
Search Engine Watch has their preprepared embargo article
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
Visit the InsideGoogle blog.
