"It's like having a photographic memory of everything you've seen with your computer, right at your fingertips. said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of Product Management at Google, as Google Inc. yesterday announced the formal launch of Google Desktop Search, a free downloadable application which enables users to search for information on their own computers.

"Google Desktop Search brings the power of Google search to information on the computer hard drive," Rosenberg continued. "We're proud to take Google Desktop Search out of beta, and we will continue to extend the utility of desktop search for users worldwide."

Previously in beta, today's 1.0 release adds search over the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored with music, image and video files. Additional enhancements include support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers, Thunderbird and Netscape email clients and new Chinese and Korean language interfaces.

In addition to searching a wide range of computer files and email, Google is the first desktop search tool to access the full text of web page history and the only one to search AOL instant messages. Google Desktop Search can also be used to recover accidentally deleted or misplaced information. For instance, a user who unintentionally deletes a Word document or PowerPoint presentation can use the tool to find the text stored in Google Desktop Search. All results are accompanied by cached snapshots of each web page and document so users can access information even if they're not connected to the web or if a document has been deleted.

Google Desktop Search will also provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable software developers to create new and innovative applications using the desktop search product. Plug-ins developed with these APIs will be made available for download at http://desktop.google.com/plugins, enabling users to search new content types such as Trillian chats and the full-text of scanned images, such as faxes.

More information on the Desktop Search APIs can be found on the web at http://desktop.google.com/apis.

Additional enhancements to Google Desktop 1.0 include a free-standing search box that users can place anywhere on their desktop; making access to desktop and web information faster and easier than before. In addition to enabling users to block HTTPS web pages, Google Desktop Search now also excludes all password-protected documents from Microsoft Word and Excel.

Google Desktop Search is available at http://desktop.google.com. It is currently available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above. It requires 500MB of disk space, a minimum of 128MB of RAM, and a 400MHz (or faster) Pentium processor is recommended.