Google Desktop

Google, the sprawling Internet corporation, has produced a new search tool named Google Desktop. Unlike its parent search engine that searches the Internet, Google Desktop indexes and searches just one computer--your own.

I'm posting an article on this outstanding tool because most of my readers store a great deal of information on hard drives. If you are like me, files that you saved a long time ago might be useful to you again, if you could only find them. For instance, the other day I was developing a sermon that I wanted to introduce with a discussion of society's disdain for organized religion. I remembered that a few years ago I delivered lessons here and there referring to this trend, but I had no idea where to start looking. After almost six years of preaching in the same place, the files saved on my hard drive were too numerous to browse, despite the fact that I had loosely organized them into folders. In comes Google Desktop. I typed in "organized religion," and in 0.3 seconds I had found every lesson I had written containing the phrase. Had I thumbed through the hard copies of my sermons, or browsed through the files on my hard drive, it could have taken over an hour to locate these documents.

Google Desktop works by indexing your hard drive and then using Google's powerful search technology to help its users locate important files. You can index as much or as little as you want by accessing the "advanced features." (I recommend eliminating web files, as these tend to pile up and are searchable through Google's main site).

If you find yourself wishing you knew where you put that sermon, or what you had discovered one time in a study on a certain subject, Google Desktop is the tool for you.