The search wars have moved to the next dimension -- your computer desktop.

In a move that beats competitors Yahoo, Microsoft, America Online and Ask Jeeves to the starting gate, Internet search giant Google (GOOG) on Thursday announced a program enhancement that searches Web pages plus e-mails, pictures, music and other documents on your computer's hard drive.

The free program can find items on your C: drive with a speed not seen before. Web analysts call Google's innovation the most significant new Internet technology in years.

"What they've done is pretty astounding," says Charlene Li, an analyst with market tracker Forrester Research. "It moves Google off the Web and into what was Microsoft's territory. Now you can do all your searching in one stop."

Google says bringing search to the desktop was the number one request from its users.

"They said, 'This Web search is wonderful. Why can't I search my computer the same way?'" says Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer web products.

Although the new program can be used exclusively offline to probe hard drives, Google designed it to meld with its online search engine. Google.com visitors who have the program installed on their computer will see a "desktop" tab above the search engine toolbar and all their search results will include a section devoted to the hard drive in addition to the Web.

Google, the Internet's most-used search engine, hopes to profit from desktop search by keeping more users at Google and expanding the number of Web searches, where it can display more ads.

In addition, after downloading the desktop application at desktop.google.com, users track their files within the main Google page -- and many queries will come back with small text ads on the side.

The desktop application is only available for Windows computers. Mayer says she hopes to offer Apple Macintosh support in the future, along with the ability to search Adobe PDF files.

Source: Agencies