Google Desktop - the company's downloadable application for searching your computer - has finally landed on Linux.

The free software download was launched in 2004 for Windows machines. There is also a paid-for enterprise version for searching company networks. Linux users have been left in the lurch all this time.

After creating the first index of all the data on your machine, which can take a few hours, it lets you search through the contents of your machine and shows the results, in familiar Google style, in a browser window. You can use "preferences" to specify files and folders that you do not wish to be searched.

The Linux version, mainly developed in Google's Beijing office, has almost identical features to the Windows version.

More from Google here. ®

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