Today Google announced a beta desktop search application that enables users to search their email, files, web history, and chats. Click here for the press release from Google. I thought this looked really cool and decided to download it.

This is a Beta release so it is not surprising that I had a fairly poor installation experience. The first problem was that this program was not compatible to the Microsoft Firewall Client I had installed on my machine at work. Google lists a number of non-compatible products that you can see by clicking here. 

After removing my firewall client the program entered into the installation process. During installation it needed to close Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Internet Explorer. I allowed the program to close those programs automatically since it offered this option. That was probably a mistake.

After installation I needed to re-launch Microsoft Outlook. When I tried to re-launch Microsoft Outlook I received the following error message:

I had to re-boot my machine in order to get Microsoft Outlook to launch again. After re-booting and launching Microsoft Outlook I received three registry error messages while Outlook was starting. Outlook did successfully re-launch and now everything is fine.

In fact, it's great!!

Google Desktop Search is one of the coolest things I have seen in a long time. I won't go into the full-blown review here but you have to try this (once they work out the installation bugs.) Essentially Google installs the same type of search engine that it uses on the Internet directly on to your local machine. It searches email, files, Internet Explorer cache files, and all kinds of other relevant stuff. The ability to use the Google interface to toggle between local content and Internet content is phenomenal and seamless. Google has done a really cool thing here. You can download it here:

http://desktop.google.com/