Google Desktop 3

The best thing about this new version of Google Desktop is that you can undock and move the various tools anywhere on your screen, expand them, collapse them, resize them, or hide them all together.

Version 3 of Google Desktop will initially look much the same as version 2. Scratch the surface though and you?ll find quite a few new features and ways to customize its look and feel.

There are dozens of additional panels available; whether they're meant to make life more fun (games, multimedia panels etc.), keep you better informed (various RSS-related panels), or make your workaday life simpler (various tools). Be sure to to make Desktop truly your own by visiting the panel gallery and looking over the choices. Be advised that you may need to download additional third-party components to make some of them functional.

There are several panels and alerts available by default with the Google Desktop 3 sidebar. You can enable or disable them at your discretion.

Desktop search (as with previous versions) requires a one-time indexing of your PC. I've also expanded the news feeds panel and dragged it to the left side of the screen. It's not bad, but still not user customizeable in terms of choosing feeds (it is based on Google's analysis of your browsing habits, worry not, they say they are not tracking you personally). You also can find several additional RSS-related panels available in the gallery.

As with its predecessor, version 3 of Desktop is meant to run continuously in the background.

Clicking on the advanced search options for a desktop search will reveal several choices including the names of the various systems you've configured to your Gmail account and are allowed to search.

Here you see evidence of a successful "search across computers" query. I performed a desktop search for any documents with the acronym "NOAA" across all three of the systems I'd installed and indexed Desktop on. You can tell which of your systems the result is being pulled from by the system's name appearing in green brackets (in this case we've blurred out name of the system).

Clicking on the link from our successful "search across computers" hunt for a Word document on a remote system we'd configured allowed us to open up a text-only version of the file cached on Google's network.