Google’s desktop search upgrade 2.0 is now available. It’s well worth the download, if only for the fact that PDFs are now indexed. But beyond PDFs, there’s a lot going on here.

I’m only a few days in, but I’m really liking the Sidebar on my desktop. The search panel delivers instantaneous results as you type your query, and gives you easy access to switch between desktop search, web search, images search, and so on.

“Web Clips” is an RSS reader, though I don’t think you’d want to use it to deliver more than about a half-dozen feeds to your desktop; I’ll still keep my BlogExpress. However, I’ve customized “Web Clips” to deliver a group of New York Times feeds to my desktop. That’s a nice feature to have in conjunction with the News panel, which delivers headlines on a realtime basis. You can de-select the types of stories you want to see in News as they appear, which is interesting. Over time, I expect that staying diligent with de-selecting will make the overall value of what’s shown rise dramatically.

The Photos panel is a nice touch, delivering a slideshow of images from any folders on your hard drive you choose. I’ve customized my sidebar slideshow to include stills and posters from favorite movies, covers of favorite CDs, and images from TV shows along with the family photos. It’s an interesting mix, and there’s something kinda fun about having Sinatra smile at me while I’m working, or seeing the evil monkey from Family Guy pointing at whatever email I’m writing at the moment.

What’s Hot purports to allow you to “learn about the current trends and what’s hot on the web,” says Google. “What’s Hot is automatically generated based on what’s currently popular on the web. It automatically combines different sources of information to determine what people are talking about online.” Sorta like the “top searches this hour” feature on Technorati, I guess. I’m not quite sure why I need that on my desktop, so it’ll probably be gone once I fine a better plugin.

About those plugins: There are 50 or 60 available right now, and my favorite is gdTunes, which lets you operate your iPod from the desktop without having to switch back and forth into your iTunes program. For Google Adsense users, there’s an app that lets you monitor the status of your account. You can create a ToDo list that stays on your desktop, and you can add a system performance monitor to your Sidebar. Once developers really dig into creating all kinds of useful and fun tools and toys for the Google Sidebar, this will become that much more of a useful and entertaining tool.

So maybe that’s what Yahoo and Konfabulator had in mind?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 28th, 2005 at 12:01 am and is filed under Internet Stuff.