Hands On With Google's Latest Free Download

Another day, another new Google service. Actually, Google Desktop 2 is an upgrade of Google Desktop Search, the company's existing hard-drive search tool. But this utility has received such a radical makeover that it's more new stuff than old.

If this were a standard upgrade, I'd focus on all the drive-searching improvements in this release, which are many and varied--from support for additional file types (Outlook, Gmail, and more), to password protection and encryption, to a toolbar that lets you search from within Outlook.

But the really striking thing about Google Desktop is the Sidebar, a customizable, personalized collection of applets (aka panels), most of which give you quick access to information on your drive and on the Web. True, there's nothing particularly innovative about the basic idea here, which owes plenty to the vertically-oriented toolbars that have been standard equipment in browsers for years. (Netscape and Firefox's versions are even called the Sidebar; come to think of it, the moniker dates back at least to the early 1990s, when a company called Paper Software released a utility by that name.)

Still, Google's take on this old idea feels fresh and inventive, not warmed over. Here's a quick rundown of the standard Sidebar panels (and that's the Sidebar itself on the left there):

Email: Links to Gmail and/or desktop e-mail inboxes. You can create very simple filters to weed out messages you don't want to see based on keywords.

News: Links to news items, with a vague explanation that the selection is based on "articles you read." (I'm assuming that means that Google Desktop is watching which news sites I visit and customizing on the fly, but it doesn't say so explicitly.) After a few hours, my list doesn't look that personalized; I probably need to give it more time.

Web Clips: Everybody seems to want to call RSS feeds something other than RSS feeds; in the Sidebar, they're Web Clips. (Which is not standard Google nomenclature--the Google Personalized Homepage calls them "feeds," and Google News knows them as "RSS.") The Web Clips tool watches where you browse on the Web, and as you come across pages with feeds, it adds them to its list. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet--I travel through a lot of sites in any given day, and the fact I've landed somewhere that has a feed doesn't necessarily mean I want it delivered to my desktop. But you can delete feeds, move them around, or add your own, so it's possible to use Web Clips as a micro-RSS reader.

Scratch Pad: A handy little note-taker. You can save anything you jot to a text file.

Photos: This is a very basic little slideshow window that looks like it should have hooks into Google's Picasa image manager or other advanced features...but doesn't.

Quick View: A list of files and sites, melding ones you've accessed recently with ones you call on often. Maybe I need to use this panel a bit more to understand its organizing principle; at the moment, I'm not sure how it's ordering new and frequently-used items, and it's not a super-intelligent list of things I really want at my fingertips. (For instance, it's creating links to pop-up ads I've recently viewed.)

What's Hot: Links to "current trends and what's hot on the Web." Right now, that seems to be a hodgepodge of news stories and current movies.

Other stuff on the Sidebar includes a stock ticker, a weather summary, and the search field--which lets you search your PC or the Web. (The search box also a very rudimentary Windows shell--you can type in part of a program name, like "pow" for PowerPoint, then click to launch the application in question.)

Is that the sum of the Sidebar's tricks? Probably not for long--Google calls each panel item a "plug-in." It'll undoubtedly come up with more, and it's already released a software development kit that lets other folks make them. (More than one Googlewatcher has likened the Sidebar to Yahoo's cool Konfabulator utility and the Widgets that it lets you run.)

Like I say, there's nothing groundbreaking about any of the above functionality. But more than with some other recent Google offerings, the implementation is Google-esque--which is to say it's logical, efficient, and practical. Each panel works the same way, with consistent features like windows that expand when you click on them to reveal more information. And though the Sidebar takes up a lot of space, you can use the Auto-hide option to push it offscreen except when you need it.

Another Google-esque thing about Google Desktop is the fact that it arrived without warning as a public beta. I don't know how much it'll evolve, but I can already think of things I'd like to see. F'rinstance:

It could use more integration with other Google services. I already mentioned Picasa; I'd also like to see it hook into the Google Personalized Homepage, so that settings you customize in one place--say, news preferences--show up in the other. (If it's already doing this, I can't tell.) Of course, such integration should be optional, since not everybody wants to use all of Google's offerings. Which brings me to request #2:

You should be able to use the Sidebar without running Desktop Search. Especially if you prefer a different drive searcher to Google's--such as Microsoft's MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search, which has some partisans around the PC World offices.

It should be more Web-native. Like the original Google Desktop Search, this is very much a desktop application; any settings you change get changed only in the particular installation you made them in. I suspect I'm going to be using the Desktop on multiple PCs, and I'd like tweaks I make to the Web Clip RSS reader, for instance, to show up everywhere.

It should run on the Mac. Like Google Earth, the Desktop is not only a desktop app but a Windows app. Google's mission statement speaks of making information universally accessible; tools that only work under Windows aren't truly universal.

In case it's not clear, I'm throwing out all these ideas for refinements because Google Desktop 2 is already clever and useful, and it's bursting with potential. Click here to download it and install it. And if you do, let us know what you think.