Google Desktop 3 launched

Google has launched version 3 of its desktop search tool. Some of you are well aware of my concerns regarding earlier versions of the software. Rather than just create an index of the original files on your computer, Google desktop makes text copies of your documents and keeps them in a cache on your PC. It is this cache that Google Desktop indexes. The main problem I have with this is that if you delete the original document a copy remains in the desktop cache. There is a remove facility but it is not straightforward and certainly not foolproof. For many organisations, this may contravene their document retention and/or records management policies and has serious implications regarding data protection and FOI.

Google Desktop 3 goes a stage further and enables you to search for files across all your computers. Great, you might think. If you are on the road and have forgotten to copy a vital document from your desktop machine onto your laptop you can quickly get to it via Desktop 3. Whoa there! In order to do this Google stores your files (web history, cache, office documents, PDF and text documents) on its own servers. That is something I am sure most organisations would definitely not want to happen. In the US the Electronic Frontier Foundation has urged consumers to boycott the software, warning that Google could be forced to turn over the data to the government if subpoenaed, even if the data is stored on Google servers temporarily. Google says that your files may remain on its servers for up to 30 days but several commentators have pointed out that Google's desktop search privacy policy states that if you uninstall the Google desktop, or deactivate your Google account, some data may stay on the Google's servers for up to 60 days.

The feature is turned off by default but I noticed that when I opted to index my Googlemail, the same screen had the Search Across Computers option, which automatically ticked itself when I enabled Googlemail indexing. OK, so you can untick it but one might be tempted to leave it, especially if you have not read the further information or the privacy policy. At least you must have a Google account of some sort to use this feature and need to type the details into Google Desktop, so that is a check against accidentally enabling it.

If you are really interested in desktop search, there are plenty of others around. I use Yahoo, but Copernic and Exalead are also excellent, and I have received good reports on them from other users.