“Google Inc.’s free software for helping people find information stored on computer hard drives emerged from test mode Monday with an upgraded product,” The Associated Press reports. “The improvements in Google Desktop extend the software’s reach beyond material searched by the “beta,” version that’s been out since October as a free download.”
“With the expansion, the software now scours hard drives for information contained in Adobe Acrobat’s portable document format, or PDF, as well as music and video files. It also will scan content in more e-mail applications. The test version only sifted through e-mail in Microsoft Outlook,” AP reports. “The software still can’t handle the formats of hundreds of other applications that run on the Windows operating system. To address that shortcoming, Google is providing the software’s application program interface, or API, so outsiders can add more features to the package. For instance, Google expects a plug-in to search for material stored in Apple Computer Inc.’s popular iTunes music library to be available soon.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 SP 3+. According to Google, “Google Desktop Search isn’t currently available for Mac OS. Right now we’re putting all of our energy into making Desktop Search the best program we can. We realize that a lot of our users would like us to offer a Mac version, and we may consider this option in the future.” Google better hurry up if they want any Mac users – we’ll have Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s ‘Spotlight’ soon enough.
Supported Spotlight File Formats:
• Plain text
• RTF
• PDF
• Mail
• Address Book contacts
• iCal calendars
• Keynote presentations
• Microsoft Office Word documents
• Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets
• Microsoft PowerPoint presentations
• Photoshop images
• Applications
• System Preferences
• iChat logs (if logging is enabled)
• Folders/directories
• Fonts
• Data files from any application with a Spotlight plug-in
Video and audio files:
• MP3
• AAC
• MOV
Images:
• JPEG
• GIF
• TIFF
• PNG
• EXIF and IPTC tags