.:i think i thought a thought:.

Is google getting defensive about its Desktop Search Search Across Computers feature?

Their latest post says “You may have read about Google Desktop 3. There are some misconceptions about how it works, particularly for enterprise users. To learn more, read the post from our friends on the Enterprise team.”

They hardly offer an explanation but jump into exposing another equally potent tool - the Enterprise Edition .

The following is the post from the Enterprise Team: “There has been some discussion about the new Search Across Computers feature released last week in Google Desktop 3 beta, and we want to chime in. Admittedly we’re of two minds on this: on the one hand, we know that our friends on the Desktop team have gone to great lengths to protect users’ data and privacy.

On the other hand, we are the Enterprise team, and we understand that a company’s data is more precious than gold — and you don’t go passing your gold around. So we should point you to Google Desktop 3 for Enterprise (beta) which can put your security fears to rest. This product has all the features of the consumer version — and then some. It also includes full administrative control. Administrators can use the standard group policy settings to completely disable product features, such as the Search Across Computer functionality, so users cannot send documents from the work computer to their home PC.

The folks at Gartner have written about this, and we agree with their recommendation: “Enterprises that are not using Google Desktop for Enterprise but are allowing employees to use Google’s desktop search application should start using the enterprise edition immediately and restrict its use accordingly.”

In addition, Enterprise customers have asked for some features we’ve now added. These features include the ability to set time-based document retention policies for different content types, and a policy to control the indexing load on your Exchange servers. We think that the Enterprise version only strengthens a solid product. If you’re reading this at work, you should consider it.”

This edition provides an option to the administrators to disallow the employees to share information from office computer to home computers. This makes it appear as if the guilty party is the employee, while evading the core issue which is that google maintains a copy of the desktop data on their remote computer.

This is what they say on their privacy page: “If you choose to enable Search Across Computers, Google will securely transmit copies of your indexed files to Google Desktop servers, in order to provide the feature. Google treats the contents of your indexed files as personal information, in accordance with the Google Privacy Policy.”

Could they find a way to provide Search Across Computers without storing the information on their servers. Like peer-to-peer technology, their must be an option to maintain the index of the information on one of the end computers instead of maintaining it on a central server. Are they exploring this? If they are, then there are no comments on those lines.

Also, if the enterprise edition provides for Search Across Computers within the enterprise by default - it passes on the responsibility to the enterprise IT team to maintain the privacy. What if the Administrator decides to enable this feature by default so that there is an internal big brother always monitoring the contents of your computer. What about the right of an employee to maintain confidentiality of information from the company (and other employees)? Considering a majority of workers in a normal company might not be very tech savvy - they might pay a heavy price for their ignorance.