| ]It's bizarre when you think about it: At the moment, it's easier ]for most PC users to find information in the billions of pages t
 ]hat make up the Web than it is to find it on their own hard
 ]drives. That's because Windows' built-in search tools are so
 ]crude, and Google is so good. But with Google's new Desktop
 ]Search utility, help is at hand--because you can now use Google
 ]to search your drive.
 ]It's a completely Googlesque search experience, which means it's ]fast, uncluttered, and accurate. And because Desktop's just
 ]another kind of Google search, you can quickly hop between
 ]results on your own system and ones on the Web, in newsgroups,
 ]and in other Google repositories.
 ]while it's extremely cool, it's not perfect. For one thing, it ]can't index every type of file--for instance, it doesn't handle
 ]the e-mail program we use here at PC World, Lotus Notes. (Too bad-
 ]-Notes' built-in search tools are nearly as annoying as
 ]Windows'.)
 ]At the moment, at least, it's also short on advanced features. ]For example, it doesn't let you limit results to files created
 ]within a certain date range. (Even Windows search does that.)
 ]Then there's something my colleague Tom Spring has blogged a]about: "This utility is so good that it finds stuff you might not
 ]want found, such as e-mails and chat transcripts."
 |