Cooll Desktop Search Tool

Greetings. I've had the Google Desktop Search tool on my computer for some time. IMO, Google does a much better job at searching my computer than the bland search tool that comes with the computer ever could or dream of doing. Let me give an example.

I am making CD's for some people for Christmas presents, since I've got loads of disks and music on my computer. In my main music area, I've got over 2100 songs. Anyway, I wanted to find songs by a particular group. I first typed in "*-the cure.mp3" and Google showed a song by Metallica called "The Cure." I then took out everything but "the cure", and got 10 results back, all from the group The Cure. Google's desktop results page lists the results in different categories, like files, web history, chats, email, etc, and if the category has results then it is linked. I clicked on the Files category, and then could further narrow my results by selecting file formats for the results I was looking for, from a combo box. After selecting Mp3 and pressing the Go button, I was presented with the 10 results. As if all this wasn't enough, each linked result had the size of the file in megabytes, its direct location on my computer, and more.

As far as I'm concerned. Google's Desktop Search utility is the way to go if you need to search your system. It can be especially helpful if you have lots of different documents (Word, Excel, PDF, etc), images (JPG, GIF, BMP, etc), or other things on your computer, like if you have a network or have lots of things stored over many years. It can even be set to search in secure password protected documents. I would advise unchecking the "search secure pages" checkbox in the preferences area, unless you want to access online shopping pages as search results. Google does not share the results with the rest of the WWW, and the tool is free. Plus, as with any of Google's tools, the search results are displayed on a web page so they're extremely easy to navigate with a screen reader. Though I don't have to do searches on a regular basis, Desktop Search is the place I turn to when and if I do need to search.