Google released Google Desktop Search beta

This maybe something great to average computer users, but such things can’t offer you reliable secure as it should be. It is not impossible that some guy hacks its protocol and try to grap some digits which just are your credit card number. Do you remember someone hacked Apple Airport Express encryption scheme this summer?

What’s more, open source programs are now offering something Google Desktop Search offers. For example, Docco, which is built on top of Apache‘s indexing and search engine Lucene, “is able to index local hard drives and everything mounted into the local file system, such as Windows or Unix network drives.”

Docco support the follwing formats:

* plain text
* HTML
* XML
* OpenOffice/ StarOffice 6.0 documents
* Word (with POI plugin)
* Excel (with POI plugin)
* PDF (with PDFbox or Multivalent plugin)
* UNIX man pages (with Multivalent plugin)

Screenshots of Docco at work can be found here.