In perhaps one of the first reviews I’ve seen of the new Google Desktop 4 beta that was released last week at Google’s Press Day, Ars Technica brings the analysis straight talking about the newest incarnation of the Google Desktop search utility. Perhaps most notably, Google has included Google Gadgets, which offer widget-style floating applications that deliver you the weather, the time and date, RSS feeds, your Google Calendar, or other tidbits that can be added onto the Google Desktop suite. If you have Google Desktop already and have another application like Yahoo! Widgets installed, you’re the target market-they want you to use the Google Gadgets and replace those widgets with their own, but unfortunately there’s still no Linux or Macintosh support for Google Desktop. (since it’s based on search and Spotlight on the Mac does is so swimmingly, I doubt we’ll see it anytime soon)

Take a look here at the new Google weather “gadget,” which is much different than a little pane in the sidebar window that Google Desktop users might be familiar with:

Now that being said, users can adjust the transparency of the gadget, and move it around the desktop to a convenient place. If you’re more of a fan of the panels we had in previous Google desktop incarnations, you can bring them back and do away with the gadgets altogether, or you can use a blend of each. Indexing and documentation are both vastly imroved over the old versions, and many of the other rough edges that made Google Desktop a good-but-not-perfect product have been sanded down to fine smoothness. If you like Google Desktop, or are in the market for a desktop search utility that adds some additional functionality to your system, this might be the update you’ve been waiting for.

[ Ars Technica :: Google Desktop 4: Now With Gadgets ]