Looking for your Stuff

I am an avid Google Desktop user. It rocks. After you download it, it takes a few hours and indexes all your

• Outlook email
• word docs
• excel docs
• powerpoint docs
• pdf files
• etc

and begins indexing from the moment you install it all your

• AOL IM chats
• Internet browsing.

Then you can do a search using the Google interface and it finds all your docs with the search term in seconds listing them chronolically. It's changed my computing.

At work they were uncomfortable with the feature that sends all of this to Google (though you can turn this off when you install it) and so they've blocked it. I complained and was directed to Lookout Search, which actually turns out to be more configurable than Google and operates from within Outlook (though it also searches on all docs). I'm finding I prefer it.

e.g. I have 2775 Contacts in my contact folder. Lookout Search is far faster (because of pre-indexing) that the standard search functionality within Outlook. Moreover, Google Desktop doesn't include Contacts in its indexing.

fyi.