Google Desktop Search allows developers to write plugins that enhance the searching of your computer files. Out of the box, Google Desktop Search will index and search Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail, Netscape and Thunderbird e-mail, Microsoft Office documents, PDF’s, music files, images, video, AOL Instant Messages and Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, Mozilla cache pages. But, as Google says, there are more than 100,000 applications and 10,000 different file types available for Windows. There’s much more to index.

To help get everything else you want indexed, and to offer even more functionality, you can install third-party plugins. These are simply extensions to the Google Desktop Search that developers write that will enhance the searching of your computer files.

All the plugins available at this time are listed below. So far, all except one are written to allow you to search more file types. The Viapoint Organizer plugin enhances your user interface by setting up smart virtual folders for better organization. Most are freeware, but some must be purchased.

When Google Desktop Search 1.0 was announced one month ago, I counted seven plugins. Today, I see fifteen. The plugin SDK hasn’t been around long, so I’m sure we’ll start seeing many more useful plugins coming out shortly.

Please read all of the Google Tutor articles on Desktop Search, particularly Keeping Private Matters Private in Google Desktop Search.

Developers: if you know Visual Studio .NET, Java, Perl, Python or any language that supports COM and XML, you can write your own plugin. For a limited time developers who submit plug-ins will have the opportunity to receive a free, limited-edition Google Desktop Developer T-shirt, be promoted on the GDS Download Plug-ins page, and advertise your plug-in for free on Google with Google AdWords. Visit the Desktop Search SDK Developer Guide for more information.

Here’s the list of current plugins. You can always find the current list here.

Airbear Software’s IndexZip Plug-in
Index the names of files within .ZIP compressed archives.
Airbear Software - Freeware - 320K - Files - Mar 14, 2005

C++ File Indexer
The CPP File Indexer plugin will enable Google Desktop Search to index any C, CPP or H file type.
Mervyn - Freeware - 50K - Files - Mar 22, 2005

Kongulo
This plugin is a web spider (”Kongulo” is Icelandic for spider) that crawls websites you specify, e.g. intranet websites, and makes them searchable via GDS.
Google - Beta - 2MB - Web History - Mar 7, 2005

Larry’s Any Text File Indexer
Search any text-based file type on your computer.
Larry Gadea - Beta/Freeware/Open Source - 91K - Files - Mar 7, 2005

Larry’s Help File Indexer
Search CHM help files and ebooks.
Larry Gadea - Freeware/Open Source - 75K - Files - Mar 7, 2005

Larry’s mIRC Indexer
Search your mIRC private messages as they take place.
Larry Gadea - Freeware/Open Source - 39K - Chats - Mar 7, 2005

Larry’s OpenOffice and StarOffice Indexer
Search all OpenOffice.org and StarOffice documents.
Larry Gadea - Beta/Freeware/Open Source - 94K - Files - Mar 9, 2005

Larry’s WordPerfect Indexer
Search all WordPerfect documents.
Larry Gadea - Beta - 139K - Files - Mar 22, 2005

Lektora RSS Reader
This plug-in enables Lektora in-browser RSS aggregator to index all articles for Google Desktop Search.
Lektora Inc. - Beta - 350K - Web History - Mar 22, 2005

MIDI Karaoke (.KAR) File Indexer
This plug-in allows Google Desktop Search to index titles, artists and lyrics from MIDI Karaoke (.KAR) files.
Chronotron - Freeware - 75K - Audio - Mar 22, 2005

Mp3tag Audio Indexer
Index metadata (like artist, title, bitrate…) of many audio formats.
Florian Heidenreich - Freeware - 1MB - Audio - Mar 22, 2005

OmniPage Search Indexer
Add image PDF, Fax and Scanned Documents to Google Desktop Search.
ScanSoft Inc. - Demo - 5MB - Files - Mar 7, 2005

Trillian IM
Indexes Trillian Pro chat conversations.
Google - Beta - 65K - Chats - Mar 7, 2005

Viapoint Organizer
Get organized using smart virtual folders that save and display Google Desktop Search results.
Viapoint - Demo - 27MB - Other - Mar 16, 2005

Wolfram Notebook Indexer
Index Mathematica-compatible notebook documents.
Wolfram Research, Inc. - Beta - 576K - Files - Mar 22, 2005