Google desktop search tool out of beta

Late last night Google formally took their desktop search tool to the public — Microsoft and Yahoo still have their equivalent offerings in beta. The newly official Google Desktop Search fully indexes email, chat sessions, visited web pages and multiple file types from PDFs to audio and video files. For security reasons, the tool by default does not index password-protected files, though it is a feature that can be enabled, sparking some controversy over privacy issues. Please note that it is now 2005, and prior to this we've seen precious few effective tools for implementing full desktop search — and may we respectfully say, what the hell has taken so freaking long?!