Google Desktop 4 Beta

Also announced today, Google Desktop 4 beta -- available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, and Brazilian Portuguese -- offers another way for users to improve their search experience, by personalizing their desktops with the introduction of Google Gadgets. These gadgets are mini-applications that reside on users' desktops and deliver a variety of personalized information such as games, media players, weather and news. Google Desktop can also recommend new gadgets and can automatically create a personalized homepage for users based on the subjects they frequently search and access.

Google currently has hundreds of gadgets users can add to their desktops and with the new Google Desktop Gadgets API, developers can easily create and share their own gadgets with other users.

Google Desktop 4 also enables 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.

-- Easily 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.

Additionally, Google Desktop 4 now offers an option for network administrators to disable Search Across Computers on both the consumer and enterprise versions of the product at the network level by simply blocking access to a specific URL.

Google Desktop 4 will be available in additional languages and include more localized features for users around the world as the product evolves. Additional information on the newest version of Google Desktop is available at http://desktop.google.com/.