Desktop for Mac Help

Google Desktop provides Google technology right on your hard drive. Desktop lets you quickly search your Mac for emails, documents, and webpages you've visited. Google Desktop even remembers earlier versions of your documents as it keeps a record of your edits and saves those files.

Like Google, Google Desktop processes documents to create a searchable index. Unlike Google, Google Desktop's technology and index live only on your computer, so your Desktop search results can only be seen from there.

When you install Google Desktop, it immediately begins to create a searchable index of the files on your hard drive. This process takes awhile; for the first few hours after you install, your Google Desktop results may be incomplete. During this time, you might see a "Partial results" message when you search. Once the indexing process is complete, this message will disappear.

The current version of Google Desktop for Mac can index the following types of files:

- PDF, .txt, and HTML files
- email from Gmail, Apple Mail, and Microsoft Entourage
- iChat transcripts
- Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files
- metadata for audio and video files (such as artist and album information)
- Address Book contacts, system preference panes, and file names for most other files including applications.

Google Desktop also searches file types that have a Spotlight plug-in.

To download and install Google Desktop for Mac, please visit http://desktop.google.com/support/mac/bin/answer.py?answer=59953

For more information, please see http://desktop.google.com/support/mac/bin/topic.py?topic=10854