Google Desktop Search
Google has released their Desktop Search tool.
So far this looks incredibly useful, and the way they've integrated it with the main Google search makes it even more likely that it will be used, since you won't have to remember to search somewhere else when you're looking for stuff.
However, it scares me that this integration is happening without any warnings.
When I go to http://www.google.com and search for “tomato”, this search can find things on my hard disk. I understand that it's a local database and a query is going to a local application that's integrating the results with the results from the main Google site.. but at this point I don't know enough about how that integration is done to trust it.
If a non-Google webpage could fool the local Google search code into giving it search results...
Funny thing is Microsoft has had the capability of building an index of the stuff on your hard disk since Windows 2000, but they've never provided a usable user interface for it, so nobody uses it. Microsoft didn't need WinFS to give this level of local search; the technology has been in Windows for 5 years. Maybe this will spur Microsoft into doing something with it.