google has released a new version of their desktop search gooogle desktop 4 beta .

the new features google has added is called google gadgets, google gadgets are basically the same panels that were there in google desktop 3.

google gadgets are the mini-applications that can be plugged in to the desktop sidebar, these can be anything from games to search tools to media players. the gadgets can also be of any shape or size.

there are a lot of ready-made gadgets avialable to use, creating a gadget is also very easy and you can create your own gadgets too.

you can also now integrate the google desktop more easily with the rest of the google products, you can add the gadgets from your personalized google homepage to your sidebar easily or for that matter anywhere on your desktop.

you can also see birthdays upcoming with the orkut gadget or whats popular on google videos or access your google calendar all from your desktop.

another interesting thing i liked about the google desktop 4 is the gadgets manager, the add and remove gadgets is similar to the familiar add / remove programs which we see in windows.

also there are lots of other cool gadgets like battery power meter which shows me battery usage for the laptops, some nice games, media player remote, google video in your desktop and lots more things.

google desktop will recommend new gadgets and can also automatically create a personalized google homepage for you based on the subjects you are interested in.

there are whole lot of gadgets to choose from including email gadgets, news gadgets, weather gadgets, photo gadgets, and lots of more cool things.

other new features

improved indexing – when you move files, google desktop now updates your index more quickly and accurately. you can also manually re-index your computer by clicking the google desktop icon in the taskbar and selecting "re-index."

easily add content to your web clips gadget – this improved gadget now allows you to stay up to date on subjects you're interested in by easily searching and adding web clips.

removing deleted files from search results - some users like the fact that google desktop saves cached versions of deleted files in case they need to retrieve them. but we know this isn't for everyone. don't want to see deleted files in your search results? just enable the "remove deleted items" option in your desktop preferences.

you can check out the extensive feature list for google destop search .