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Lately, I have been using Google's Desktop Search, Google's new search engine for your PC, a lot in my development. It's fast as lightening and very accurate. Most often, I use it to grep source code, like the Perl and PHP source.

Helpfully, it also keeps caches of older versions of my files. For example, the other night I needed to look up a snippet of Perl code, but I forgot which file I put it in. So I fired up the desktop search and found the snippet in one of 37 caches that Google Desktop kept on a constantly changing file. That's right, 37!

How are the rest of you using it?

Last night I even had a dream about the desktop search...

I was back in college and installed it on my PC under a drive that was mapped to the main Unix machine that everyone used. Wouldn't you know?: Google Desktop indexed everyone's Unix account, allowing me to see everybody's files, including pictures of this one graduate student I liked. I never thought I would get to see them!

(For those of you who don't know: Google Desktop can index files under all user accounts on your PC. This feature has caused some privacy concerns.)

Sadly, the desktop search only works on Windows. No Mac or Linux version is available yet. So it was only a dream. ;-)

In reply to Google Desktop as a development tool by jacques

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