You get that for which you pay.

Google now offers a desktop version of their billion—dollar search engine for free! That's right, free! Well, one must spend some time with installation, option selection and waiting for the indexing engine to slug through its business — this it will do by itself while your processor is idle — but in terms of hard currency exchange: zero.

Unfortunately, based on my personal test of this software versus a file browsing package I purchased awhile back, it doesn't seem worth much more.

After having once indexed my hard drive, changing my mind about options, ferreting out how to get a clean second index, and indexing a second time, I was ready to see just how well this new file—finding wunderkind would work. 

In one corner was the challenger Google Desktop. In the other, Filestream's 'TurboBrowser' was ready to defend its title as file—finder of my preference. I picked the word 'scouts', as in Boy Scouts, and let Google rip. In 0.03 seconds I was presented with 22 results. Great, I thought. This is really fast compared to all that clacking and clunking of my hard drive when using TurboBrowser. Let me see what it can do to retain its championship against this hard—charging up—and—comer.

In all fairness, I did give Turbo a break. Searched just one directory, albeit a very large one, but not the whole C: drive that Google took a two—plus hours or so to index. In went '*.*' for the file name wild card and 'scouts' into the 'Containing text:' entry box. After about a minute or so of that clacking and clunking up popped a list of 79 files of a number of different types —  .eml, .pdf, .txt, .doc, and 'dot' so forth — that I could now browse by clicking and highlighting the file name in the results widow provided for this very same purpose. How convenient.

Now, TurboBrowser is not perfect. I have my list of irritating features and non—features, but it does get the job done. And for it to have a nearly four—to—one advantage in the count of the number of files found when searching for something no more complex than a single word, seems to indicate singularly poor performance on the part of Google Desktop.

Wonder if this says anything about their web engine?

Turbo Browser costs $69.95 here. You are the one who must decide is it is worth it.

I don't have billions of Google dollars, so what do I know?