A head-to-head test of searches

The antitrust spat that may come to a head — or be resolved — this week centers on desktop search tools and whether the one built into Windows Vista unfairly competes with those that can be downloaded from more than a dozen providers, including major Internet competitors Google and Yahoo!

The search tools are great for finding information quickly on our increasingly stuffed computers. Type a word into the search box, and hits from across your computer — documents, photos, cached Web pages, e-mail, IM chats — come back instantly.

The same term can be easily searched on the Internet, which is part of why this service is so important to companies.

The search boxes are like a path that leads you from the confines of your PC to information on the Web. Use Google's desktop search and you're more likely to use its Internet search service, too, which is where the company makes its billions selling advertising.

I downloaded and installed Google Desktop Search on a PC last week, and it began indexing the contents to speed up desktop searches.

I did this on a relatively empty Vista PC, and the process took no more than 20 minutes. Building an index on computers that have more data on them would have taken up to a few hours.

As the indexer did its thing, Google looked to blaze more paths from the desktop, a space traditionally dominated by Microsoft, to its online services. During set-up, Google.com became the home page, and the company's search engine was set as the default choice — unless I unchecked a couple of boxes.

It asked whether I wanted to replace the Vista sidebar, a strip of customizable gadgets that display time, weather, photos, stock prices and other information, with Google's version. This is another place where Google puts a search box — the start of another path.

When I did this, I got the feeling the sidebars from Google and Microsoft were jostling back and forth for my attention on the desktop. A short time after I put the Google Sidebar in place, the Windows Vista sidebar slid out from under the Google Sidebar as if to say, "I'm still here, too."

Now I had basically the same set of services — one from each company, side by side — taking up real estate on the right side of the screen.

Later, when I had the Vista sidebar in place, I clicked a link in my Google Desktop Search results and it launched the Google sidebar over the Vista one.

Pick me! Pick me!

— Benjamin J. Romano