New Version Of Google Desktop Released
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
It seems there are very few new features to even consider launching version 3. Maybe just Desktop 2.5.
You can find interesting draggable widgets in the new Opera 9 (http://labs.google.com - you can download Technical Preview).
Comment by Ionut Alex. Chitu | February 9, 2006
I love the idea of searching across a network but… I’ve never really liked Google Desktop and I definitely don’t like the sidebar thingy. My desktop real estate costs a LOT which is why I normally like Google’s stuff. It resides on the Internet and not on my desktop.
Comment by Nicholas | February 9, 2006
Nicholas, they mentioned how people don’t like giving up desktop real estate and you don’t have to. You can make the panels float and then hit shift twice to make them appear and disappear.
Comment by Niraj | February 9, 2006
Yay, Google has progressed so much that I no longer need to install several betas just to do what I want. Desktop 2 non-beta it is, well, for me anyway.
I’d only like them to update GD2 to include support for IE7… I’m not sure what’s wrong, but it doesn’t work for me (the indexing feature). Gotta look into that, perhaps I’m just using extreme security settings.
Comment by Tim | February 9, 2006
Google Desktop 3 beta levanta questões sobre privacidade
O Google liberou a versão 3.0 beta de seu aplicativo Google Desktop Search, que traz como novidade a possibilidade de procurar em outros computadores que fazem parte de sua rede. A idéia parece ótima, mas para que isto aconteça, o…
Trackback by Meio Bit | February 9, 2006
[…] » New Version Of Google Desktop Released » InsideGoogle » part of the Blog News Channel (tags: google desktop rss) […]
Pingback by My Weblog » Blog Archive » links for 2006-02-10 | February 11, 2006
[…] New Version Of Google Desktop Released […]
Pingback by Chenta’s Scrapbook » Blog Archive » del.icio.us backup Mar27,06 | March 27, 2006