The Desktop: a future stronghold for Google?

Hype has grown quickly in the blogosphere and elsewhere around Google's latest service, freshly out of its R&D labs: Google Desktop Search. Whether a brilliant idea, an attractively packaged marketing ploy or a blatant privacy infringement and security breach, only time will tell. But as the Washington Post reports today, "[Google] has acquired a different role: Microsoft's No. 1 foreign aid donor".

That may seems quite a bit far-fetched, but Google is actually just pushing long-wanted features (or even better, benefits) that are missing from Microsoft's Operating System (OS). Look back in 2000, when the company launched its Google Toolbar, which above everything else provided pop-up blocking to Internet Explorer users, something Microsoft would eventually integrate in its OS nearly 4 years afterwards (in Windows XP SP2).

Here with desktop searching, history repeats: Microsoft's much-anticipated search engine is to be included in Longhorn (Windows XP successor) in ... 2006. No wonder why Microsoft is bound to appreciate Google's tool, which (from what I have been able to test so far) seems to stand up against Apple's own Spotlight search engine, to come out in Tiger, Apple's next version of Mac OS X to be released in H1 2005.

While the jump from web search to desktop search may look like a large one at first sight, Google's continuous expansion of its searching offer - from Web pages to newsgroups, images, news, products and e-mails, has unified the searching "experience" to its users. Cloning this experience and easiness of use to individual machine is therefore a very logical step forward.

Who said search was a solved problem?