Google Introduces Four New Products - Google Desktop 4
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Matt Cutts has been a hardcore hold out as far as sticking with the original version of Google Desktop, and even he admitted that the latest version of the software might be enough to push him into upgrading. The beta is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese. But never mind the nice range of languages; Google Desktop 4 (http://desktop.google.com/) introduces something that some Yahoo users might find eerily familiar.
They’re called gadgets. What they are is little applications that you can use to customize your desktop. One shows the weather; another one looks like a drop-down menu with news headlines; a third shows videos; another one delivers games. There are more than a hundred of these gadgets currently available, and with the Google Desktop Gadgets API, developers can make many more and share them with other users. To me this sounds an awful lot like the widgets that Yahoo made available after it bought Konfabulator. You can read my colleague Mike McEwan’s article about the purchase here (http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-News/Yahoo-Assimilates-
Konfabulator/).
That’s not the only thing new with Google Desktop 4 of course. If you really like the gadgets and don’t want to miss out on any chance to use them, well, Google Desktop can recommend new ones for you to use. It can also create a home page for you based on the topics you enjoy searching for regularly. Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, noted while showing off the product that “It has figured out that I’m a movie buff and that I use eBay and that I travel a lot.” It would be nice if the product lets you save more than one personalized home page, so that you can, for instance, call up one that organizes information you need for work and another one for home.
There are a lot of other new Google Desktop features, many of them tied to gadgets. The new features allow users to:
- Access their Google Gadget content and settings from other computers and protect it from computer crashes by saving it online.
- Add favorite gadgets from their personalized Google homepage right onto their desktops.
- Access other Google services from their desktop. For example, users can view upcoming birthdays with the orkut.com gadget, see what's popular on Google Video, or access their Google Calendar directly on the desktop.
- Manually re-index their computers or remove deleted files from search results.
Network administrators that are particularly concerned about security will be glad to hear that Google Desktop 4 now offers an option for them to disable Search Across Computers on both the consumer and enterprise versions of the product at the network level. This is accomplished simply by blocking access to a specific URL.
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