Google Desktop is Google's desktop search offering available locally for Windows XP and Windows 2000 SP3+ PC. The desktop search program allows full text search of a users' e-mail, computer files, music, photos, chat, and Web pages viewed.
Google Desktop indexes all the your files for efficient searching. This is unlike Windows XP's built-in search function which scans whole files instead of a list. For a better understanding, consider this analogy: If one is trying to find the title of a chapter of a book in a library, Windows XP's search will search through all the books in the library, whereas Desktop scans the card catalog – a time-saving process.
Google has also added sharing features, allowing you to send content from your sidebar to others. You can do this via chat or email, or through a new feature that actually allows you to send your sidebar content directly to the sidebar of other users, by dragging the content into your Google Talk buddy list.
Finally—and to me this is the coolest feature—you can use the Google Desktop to search across multiple computers. This means that you can use your laptop to search for content on your desktop or any other computer that you choose. This is an advanced feature that you must enable to use, but setting it up is a straightforward process.
