Goebel Group In the News

Digital Hide-and-Seek

Desktop search can help you sort through your computer's contents

By MARYANN MURRAY BUECHNER

Jan. 10, 2005
If you've come to think of your computer as a digital version of the couch that swallowed your car keys--with photos, songs and travel plans all buried in hard-to-reach places--a new breed of software known as desktop search can help. The big names in Internet search--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AOL--have released, or will release early this year, a desktop-search tool for consumers, making it as easy to search your PC's hard drive as it is to search the Web. (Existing search tools built into Windows are too cumbersome to compare, says Dave Goebel, president of the search advisory firm Goebel Group.)

These free programs, typically just a few megabytes in size, are easy to download. Once installed, the software gets to work indexing files, a task that can take several hours and is done only when the machine is idle. From then on, you simply click on an icon or a toolbar to use it.

Google Desktop Search (available at desktop.google com works inside your Web browser: type keywords into the search field, just as you would to search the Internet. Although Google's program scours Word and Excel documents, Outlook messages and more, to find matches for your queries, it recognizes audio and video only by file name.

Microsoft's desktop-search program, on the other hand--part of a new MSN Toolbar Suite beta.toolbar.msn.com)--examines the metadata embedded in multimedia files as well. The MSN program also allows you to create different indexes for separate user accounts. So if you share a computer with, say, your kids and want to maintain some privacy, you can still keep them away from any files you have hidden. (With Google, you'd have to exclude those files from the index altogether.)

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