While Microsoft and Yahoo have been doing their darndest to hit Google where it hurts in the online search engine ad space, Google has thrown out a chilling warning to Microsoft with the latest version of its Google Desktop product, version 4. To be frank, it has features that cut deep into Microsoft's territory. 

Like previous versions of its product, Google Desktop 4 has the ability to index everything on your computer's hard disk from your Microsoft Office files to your instant message chats and Sunday picnic snapshots. And it allows you to retrieve them easily and quickly by a simple search. This is something Microsoft does not have.

However, with the latest version, you get a very intuitive and useful customisable sidebar that sits cleanly on your desktop, which allows you display such things as newsfeeds, your latest emails, a scratchpad, maps, weather forecasts, favourite webpages, a system monitor, a WiFi indicator and other little useful and not so useful applications that Google refers to simply as Gadgets.

In addition to the sidebar, there is what Google calls the deskbar, which is a search box that sits inside the Windows taskbar and floating deskbar, which is the same thing that can be dragged to sit anywhere on the desktop.

The whole idea is to be able to access and search for both offline and online information without having to leave the desktop visit your web browser. This undercuts the importance of the browser as the online search vehicle, which is what Google wants of course. Why would you want to launch a browser when you can search for or access all your favourite web pages from the desktop? Ironically this is not good news for Microsoft, which would rather users leave its desktop and visit its new IE 7 browser which has a default Windows Live Search box sitting in its tool bar.

As far as the Gadgets themselves are concerned, Google makes it obvious that it intends the list to grow. Thre are already applications that cut across Microsoft's territory such as a media player, to do list and calendar. With the purchase of online wordprocessing startup Writely a few months ago, it's fairly obvious that Google intends to add Gagdets that sit squarely in the Microsoft Office domain.

With the release of Google Desktop 4, the waters for Microsoft have once again become murky. Here it was getting set to attack Google in the search space using its browser dominance (which Google has challenged in legal forums), yet Google has now moved to lessen the importance of the browser in the scheme of things by moving the war to Microsoft's home turf, the desktop. {moscomment}