Tech Shout!

Google has just announced the release of a beta version of its Google Desktop for Linux. Google Desktop allows users of all major operating systems to search their desktop and the Web as quickly and comprehensively as they search the Web using search engine Google.

The main features of Google Desktop for Linux are:

Comprehensive Indexing: Users can search the full text of virtually all their computer’s content, including text, PDF, PS, source code, HTML files, email from Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org documents, Man and Info pages, folders, images and music.

Google Desktop for Linux can also find previous versions of files or recover those that have been accidentally deleted

Quick Search Box: The Quick Search Box is the fastest way to do Web and desktop searches. Hitting the command key twice calls it up, instantly displaying results as users type.

Gmail and Web History Search: Not everything users are looking for resides on their computer. Google Desktop for Linux makes it easy for users to simultaneously search their Gmail webmail, Web search history and the Web at large. And, because their index is stored locally on their own computer, users can even access their Gmail and Web history while they’re offline.

Google Desktop for Linux (beta) was developed by Google’s Beijing engineering team. A while ago, Google had released the beta version of Google Desktop for Mac OS X.

Google had released Linux versions of its Picasa, Google Earth and Google Toolbar for Firefox applications. Now, Google Desktop joins the company’s offerings for Linux.

And, besides creating products that run on Linux, Google supports the Linux community in a variety of ways, such as releasing open source code, running the Summer of Code and hosting several open source projects on Google Code.

Google Desktop for Linux (beta) is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean and Portuguese. It runs on Debian 4.0, Fedora Core 6, Ubuntu 6.10, SUSE 10.1 and Red Flag 5, and can be downloaded from desktop.google.com.