Digital Hide-and-Seek

If you've come to think of your computer as a digital version of the couch that swallowed your car keys--with photos, songs and travel plans all buried in hard-to-reach places--a new breed of software known as desktop search can help. The big names in Internet search--Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves, AOL--have released, or will release early this year, a desktop-search tool for consumers, making it as easy to search your PC's hard drive as it is to search the Web. (Existing search tools built into Windows are too cumbersome to compare, says Dave Goebel, president of the search advisory firm Goebel Group.)

These free programs, typically just a few megabytes in size, are easy to download. Once installed, the software gets to work indexing files, a task that can take several hours and is done only when the machine is idle. From then on, you simply click on an icon or a toolbar to use it.

Google Desktop Search (available at desktop.google com works inside your Web browser: type keywords into the search field, just as you would to search the Internet. Although Google's program scours Word and Excel documents, Outlook messages and more, to find matches for your queries, it recognizes audio and video only by file name.

Microsoft's desktop-search program, on the other hand--part of a new MSN Toolbar Suite beta.toolbar.msn.com)--examines the metadata embedded in multimedia files as well. The MSN program also allows you to create different indexes for separate user accounts. So if you share a computer with, say, your kids and want to maintain some privacy, you can still keep them away from any files you have hidden. (With Google, you'd have to exclude those files from the index altogether.)

A special feature of the Ask Jeeves desktop-search program askjeeves.com is a separate window for previewing files before opening them. Yahoo's software, which may be released as early as next week, will offer similar functionality. AOL Desktop Search, part of an upcoming AOL browser aol.com) will be free to members and nonmembers alike. Newcomer Blinkx blinkx.com has a unique approach: it automatically refers you to files that are relevant to what you're doing on your computer at that moment. The links blink in the corner of your screen.

A caveat: desktop search might make it "marginally" easier for hackers to steal your private data, Gartner research director Allen Weiner says. But Weiner and most analysts agree that the rewards greatly outweigh the risks. If you've got a firewall--and anybody with Windows XP has one by default--you should be fine.