Google Desktop Search

Have you seen this new Desktop search tool from Google? Essentially it's a search engine/application for use on your local machine, rather than the web. By default it indexes all files on your machine.

Google Desktop Search finds:

• Outlook / Outlook Express
• Word
• AOL Instant Messenger
• Excel
• Internet Explorer
• PowerPoint
• Text

A neat trick (which I guess it does with cookies for the www.google.com site) is that it puts a link on the existing www.google.com site to search your desktop instead of the web. A nice thing that it does is that it searches your Outlook emails - and returns results in super quick time! From a technical point of view, what it looks like is that it installs some kind of mini-web server - you search through the browser on an address of http://127.0.0.1:xxxx/.