Google Desktop gets huge performance boost

Google Desktop is an application that resides on your computer, and does a couple of things that people might find useful. The software indexes all your files, and lets you search through them at Google-speed. In addition to that, you also get the Google Desktop sidebar which resembles the one you can find in Windows Vista.

One beef users have had with regards to Google Desktop was the performance of it. Google released a new version of their software yesterday which mainly focuses on performance -- and boy did it work. The application seems a lot faster, and the memory footprint is quite a bit smaller than before.

Ionut also noticed that Google has disabled the feature that indexes your files by default, and uses the index created by Microsoft's desktop search service.

In addition to performance enhancements, there were also a couple of new features that are worth mentioning. Support for flash gadgets (those little applications that sit on your sidebar) has been added, as well as tighter search capability for Outlook.

If you haven't tried it before, or you stopped because it was a memory hog, give Google Desktop a try.