Taking the plunge

We seem to be famous (or infamous) for never taking our products out of beta -- the software equivalent of commitment issues, perhaps. But in one case, at least, we're taking the plunge: Google Desktop Search has been kicked out of the Google Labs nest, and is officially 1.0.

We've been listening to your suggestions, and this release is crammed with our responses. You can now search your computer for PDFs and media files like MP3s, JPGs and GIFs, video files and so on (Desktop Search even indexes your media files' meta-info, so you can search for artist and file names, song titles, etc). And version 1.0 supports the Thunderbird and Mozilla email clients, Firefox browser -- and Chinese and Korean languages. There's a new floating deskbar you can place anywhere on your desktop, too. To better protect your personal info, Desktop Search won't search password-protected Office files. And serious geeks can now search cool new filetypes and create customized apps with the Google Desktop Search API.

If you already have the earlier Desktop Search, you'll automatically get all these upgrades. If you haven't, maybe it's time to take the plunge yourself.

Nikhil Bhatla
Product Manager