Google Desktop gives you easy access to information on your computer and from the web. It's a desktop search application that provides full text search over your email, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail, web pages that you've viewed, and more. By making your computer searchable, Google Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize your files, emails and bookmarks. It makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google.

Google Desktop doesn't just help you search your computer; it also helps you gather new information from the web with Sidebar, a desktop feature that shows you your new email, weather, stock information, personalized news, RSS/Atom feeds, and more. Sidebar is personalized automatically, without any manual configuration required (though you can certainly make your own customizations if you want to or turn off automatic personalization).

New! Google Desktop 4 Want a clock on your desktop? How about a calendar, a WiFi indicator, a TV, or anything else you can dream up? Say hello to Google Gadgets. These interactive mini-applications can be anything from games to search tools to media players, and they can be any shape and size use a weather globe to show you the latest forecast. Weve got a lot of ready-made gadgets to get you started, but theyre so easy to create that you can probably figure out how to build your own.

You can also save your gadget content and settings online to protect your info from computer crashes and be able to access it from your other computers by logging into your Google Account with Google Desktop. For instance, you can now synch the To Do list on both your laptop and your desktop.

Google Desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized Google homepage for you based on the subjects youre most interested in. For instance, if you're constantly doing searches on new movies, Google Desktop can automatically recommend a movies gadget to add to your desktop.

Google has also integrated Google Desktop more fully with the rest of Google. For instance, you can now add Google Gadgets from your personalized homepage into your Google Sidebar, or anywhere else on your desktop You can also view upcoming birthdays with the orkut gadget, see whats popular on Google Videos, or access your Google Calendar right from your desktop.

The Google Desktop is a part of the Google Pack of Productivity software offered for free by Google. The Google Pack is touted as a "collection of safe, useful software from Google and other companies that improves the user experience online and on the desktop." In addition to the popular Desktop Search it also includes the adware/spyware detector Ad-Aware (SE Personal) and a free 6-month subscription to Norton Anti-Virus, as well as numerous other tools designed to make your online experience less frustrating. It is free and easy to install. Google Pack beta is available in English, runs on Windows XP, and supports Firefox 1.0 and higher and Internet Explorer 6.0 and higher. It can be downloaded by clicking the banner above.

 
The Google Pack includes: 

* Adobe Reader 7

* Ad-Aware SE Personal

* GalleryPlayer HD Images

* Google Desktop

* Google Earth

* Google Pack Screensaver

* Google Talk

* Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer

* Mozilla Firefox with Google Toolbar

* Norton AntiVirus 2005 Special Edition

* Picasa

* RealPlayer

* Trillian

To read more about recent additions to Google's functionality, see these articles:

• Google Offers Free Calendaring
• Google Offers Free Web Analytics
• Google Offers Video Search
• Google Buys Blogger.com
• Google Enhances News Search
• Google Offers Catalog Searches
• Google Indexes Microsoft Office & Other File Types
• Google Indexes PDFs
• Google Adds Image Search
• Google Expands its People-Finder Capabilities