Software Update: Google Desktop Search 1.0

Google released version 1.0 of Google Desktop Search (GDS) yesterday. GDS indexes the text of documents, web pages and emails and the meta tags of music files and allows the user to search through all that data. For file types that are not natively supported, plugins are written with the Desktop Search SDK. GDS search results can be retrieved offline via a dedicated web page or incorporated online into the results of a normal Internet search. The program is available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 from SP3. The website has the following changelog:

Desktop Search now lets you search your

• PDF files
• Multimedia files, including audio (MP3, WMA, WAV and more), images (JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP and more), and videos (AVI, MPG, WMV, and more), by meta-tag. For instance, you can search by song title or artist name.
• Web pages you’ve viewed using the Netscape 7+, Mozilla and Firefox browsers
• Email from Netscape Mail, Mozilla Mail and Thunderbird

Users can also download plugins that will search even more file formats. Developers can write plugins using the Desktop Search SDK that index more file formats as well as to integrate desktop search into their own applications.

We’ve also made it easier to use Desktop Search by allowing you to access it via a deskbar on your desktop. And we’ve enhanced your security by adding a new privacy option, which prevents indexing password-protected Office files.