Google has released a beta version of their desktop search tool.  More information via Google can be found here, and some reviews are here and here.  I normally would be all over some beta software like this, but my machine is already exceeding it's limits (still waiting on Kingston to ship me the half-gig stick o' RAM they owe me) so I am going to pass for now, not to mention that as of this release it only indexes the C:\ drive (this does me no good as all of my docs are on a seperate drive, e:\)  My take?  Google is simply smoking its rivals right now in the search department (as if it wasn't already).  This dishes out a huge blow to Microsoft as their built in search in windows simply sucks for anything more than a trivial amount of data, and the MS indexing service is ridiculously resource (mainly I/O) intensive...it's the first thing I turn off on a new install of Windows, not to mention this service wreaks havoc with ASP.NET temporary files.  If this product comes even close to what's mentioned in the reviews mentioned above, MS has it's work cut out with WinFS, and Lookout might be too little too late for email indexing.  Google is building an information searching empire, and I can't wait to see what's next (rumors of a Google browser abound).  I look forward to future versions of this product.  Happy searching.

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