Google Desktop

A prominent feature of the Google Desktop is the Sidebar, which holds several common Gadgets and resides off to one side of the desktop. The Sidebar is available on the Windows and Linux versions of Google Desktop. The Sidebar comes pre-installed with the following gadgets:

• Email – a panel which lets one view their own Gmail messages.
• Scratch Pad – here the user can store notes; they are saved automatically
• Photos – displays a slideshow of photos from the "My Pictures" folder (address can be changed)
• News – shows the latest headlines from Google News, and how long ago they were written. The News panel is personalized depending on the type of news you read.
• Weather – shows the current weather for a location specified by the user.
• Web Clips – shows updated content from RSS and Atom web feeds.
• Google Talk – If Google Talk is installed, double clicking the window title will dock it to the user's sidebar.

Like the Windows Taskbar, the Google Desktop sidebar can be set to Auto-Hide mode, where it will only appear once the user moves the mouse cursor towards the side where it resides. If not on auto-hide, by default the sidebar will always take up about 1/6 – 1/9 of the screen (depending on the screen resolution), and other windows are forced to resize. However, the sidebar can be resized to take less space, and users can disable the "always on top" feature in the options. With the auto-hide feature on, the sidebar temporarily overlaps maximized windows.

Another feature that comes with the Sidebar is alerts. When the Sidebar is minimized, new email and news can be displayed on a pop-up window above the Windows Taskbar.

Quick find box

When searching in the sidebar, deskbar or floating deskbar, Google Desktop displays a "Quick Find" window. This window is filled with six (by default) of the most relevant results from the user's computer. These results update as the user types, and allows use without having to open another browser window.

Deskbars are boxes which enable searching directly from the desktop. Web results will open in a browser window, and selected computer results will be displayed in the "Quick Find" box (see above). A Deskbar can either be a fixed deskbar, which sits in the Windows Taskbar, or a Floating Deskbar, which may be positioned anywhere on the desktop.

Google Desktop includes plugins that allow indexing and searching the contents of local Microsoft Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes, and Mozilla Thunderbird email databases, outside of the client applications' built-in search functions. For Lotus Notes, only local databases are indexed for searching. Google Desktop's email indexing feature is also integrated with Google's web-based email service, Gmail; it can index and search the email messages in Gmail accounts.

Desktop gadgets are interactive mini-applications that can be placed anywhere on the user's desktop – or docked in the Sidebar – to show new email, weather, photos, and personalized news. Google offers a gallery of pre-built gadgets for download on the official website. For developers, Google offers an SDK and an official blog for anyone who wants to write gadgets or plug-ins for Google Desktop. An automated system creates a developer hierarchy called the "Google Desktop Hall of Fame", where programmers can advance based on their gadgets' number and popularity.

The SDK also allows third-party applications to make use of the search facilities provided by Google Desktop Search. For example, the file manager Directory Opus offers integrated Google Desktop Search support.

Even though other desktop search programs can search files meta data, Google Desktop (for Windows) is the only one that uses the "title" tag for its results lists of all files (On Linux it shows the meta-data of HTML files, but not PDF files). Other programs use the file names for their results lists. The use of the "title" tag gives a significantly better user experience, since metadata titles (when present) are written in ordinary language, while file names are less communicative. When the title meta data is missing from a file, Google Desktop reverts to use its filename.

In February 2007, Yair Amit, of Watchfire, found a series of vulnerabilities[16] in Google Desktop that could allow a malicious individual to achieve not only remote, persistent access to sensitive data, but in some cases full system control as well. The significant impact and the ease of exploitation forced Google to change some of Google Desktop's logic in Google Desktop version 5.

Many privacy and civil liberties groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have concerns that personal information on people's computers could readily be copied from users' hard drives.[17]

Google Desktop version 3 contains certain features that raise serious security and privacy concerns. Specifically, the share across computers feature, which introduces the ability to search content from desktop to desktop, greatly increases the risk to users' privacy. If Google Desktop V.3 is set to allow Search Across Computers, files on an indexed computer are copied to Google's servers. The potential for information stored on their computers to be accessed by others if they enable this feature of Google Desktop v. 3 on their computers should be seriously considered. The EFF advises against using this feature.[17] Also, those who have confidential data on their work or home computers should not enable this feature. There are privacy laws and company policies that could be violated through the installation of this feature, specifically, SB 1386, HIPAA, FERPA, GLBA and Sarbanes-Oxley.[18]

Other more far reaching concerns arise around the packaging and end user license agreement – specifically the level of intrusion on the local machine and the disclaimers that users implicitly agree to future changes in the license agreement without actually being able to see them immediately.[19][20]

There had been some issues with Microsoft Outlook indexing.[21] Deleted email listings were not removed and required re-installing Google Desktop for any new archived mail to be listed. Several versions have been released to patch the Outlook indexing.[22]

During the first half of 2009, a large number of Google Desktop users reported that the product stopped indexing suddenly, when the index file reached approximately 4GB in size. A full uninstall (including manually deleting the indexes) and then reinstall would fix the problem temporarily, but the problem would recur when the index file reached 4GB again. The problem has been resolved as of Google Desktop Search version 5.9.[23] Currently, Google Desktop does not index email or contacts in Outlook 2010.

By default, Google Desktop does not index email in Thunderbird 3.[24]