Google Desktop 2 Beta Watches Your Habits

A public beta of Google Desktop 2 adds RSS feeds, email monitoring, stock quotes and more to the company's desktop search tool - and it also watches what you do.

Google today unveiled a public beta of Google Desktop 2, the latest version of the company’s free desktop search tool. In addition to offering quick searches of files and folders on your local hard drives, Google Desktop 2 adds rapid application launching, a new extensible Sidebar which can view your email (from Google’s Gmail service or your ISP) as soon as it arrives, as well as display current news, weather, stock info, and photographs, RSS feeds, and more. And, in a new twist, the Sidebar monitors your behavior and constantly updates the Sidebar contents to present relevant information, including personalized news items.

Some features involve sending data about user’s Web-surfing habits back to Google to retrieve new, relevant results, but the company says no personally identifiable information is transmitted and users can completely opt-out.

Google Desktop generates fast search results for local files by generating and then maintaining an index to files on the local system, similar to the Spotlight feature Apple introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Although Google recommends against installing Google Desktop on machine on machines available for general use in locations like labs and Internet cafes, the new version can encrypt the index to protect it from snooping. Google Desktop can also integrate directly into Microsoft’s Outlook email program.

The Google Desktop 2 public beta is available for free; it requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP.