Google, the world's top Internet search company, on Monday launched its desktop search, a free downloadable application which enables users to search for information on their own computers.

Google said its Desktop Search 1.0 extends desktop search to the full text of PDFs and the meta-information stored with music, image and video files.

Additional enhancements include support for the Firefox and Netscape browsers, Thunderbird and Netscape email clients and new Chinese and Korean language interfaces, the company said.

"Google Desktop Search brings the power of Google search to information on the computer hard drive," said Jonathan Rosenberg, vice president of Product Management at Google. "It's like having a photographic memory of everything you've seen with your computer, right at your fingertips."

In addition to searching a wide range of computer files and email, Google said its desktop search tool can access the full text of web page history and search AOL instant messages.

Google also claimed that its desktop search tool can be used to recover accidentally deleted or misplaced information, because the text of the files will be stored in Google Desktop Search.

"Google desktop search stores a copy of everything you see," said Nikhil Bhatla, a Google product manager. "That can be extremely useful if, for example, an application crashes. With (the tool), you can get the text of that last document you were working on."

Google Desktop Search is currently available for Windows XP and Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above.