Desktop Search is an application and as the name says, it helps you find the files on hard disk and emails in more easier and faster way. "Desktop search" programs have two goals: to find the desired information, and to find it quickly.
These search programs accomplish their speed by indexing the data they search through. Instead of poring through every file as if it was being searched for the first time, these programs prepare an index of the essential information about each file. If you have 100GB of videos sitting around, a desktop search program will ignore the data, culling out titles, authors, and other metadata.
Desktop Searches give the ease by providing:
1) Easily accessible interfaces which sit on taskbar or desktop to make user easily access it for finding a file/email. It just looks like a bar with an input box.
2) Many data and type filters are provided with in the interface to restrict the search.
3) Advanced query syntax which enables you to restrict your query to specific locations, specific file types or properties within those types, or specific "file kinds".
4) Apart from making your search easier and fast, these applications make you act on the item you are searching for in the interface itself. They provide preview for the results with in which you can get the data of the item without actually opening it.
I have been using Windows Desktop Search and I have used Google's also
...Just a note from my observations on WDS and GDS:-> If you want an application very much dedicated to surf your hard disk/emails easily and access it fast, better option I think is WDS. The windows-like interface, preview pane and context menus with most relevant and useful options add points to WDS in this sense.
-> If you want your desktop to be fancier along with easier ways of searching desktop as well as web, you can go for GDS. The interface being exactly the same as that of google.com with various web search filters justifies it. Sidebar of Google with Gadgets gives you more personalized desktop.
