Up until recently, most of us tried to organize things by creating folders to group similar items together. It works reasonably well for some files but its cumbersome and slow. Google has created a tool that conquers this problem once and for all, and its free.

Google desktop is a little application that indexes the files on your hard drive and makes them instantly available via a search interface like the once on google.com. Whenever you're looking for a file, you type in a search phrase and Google Desktop finds a list of matching documents which can be instantly sorted by file type.

Let's say you want to find a file sent to you by one of your colleagues (maybe a past issue of the eZine you filed away to read later). You type in the topic into the Google Desktop seach page and every email that includes that topic, including the ePhilanthropy eZine pops up. Anyone who has ever waited on Microsoft Outlook to search through past emails will be pleasantly surprised at Google Desktop's speed. Your search results will also contain instant messenger chats, Word or Excel documents, images, music files, and any web page you have visited that mentioned that topic. In other words, every file on your computer is instantly available with Google Desktop.

Google Desktop is available in multiple languages.

Right now Google Desktop is available for PC users only, but Mac users have similar features built right into the new Tiger Operating System with Mac. Microsoft apparently has plans to offer something similar, but they will be hard pressed to top Google Desktop's clean interface and amazing speed.

Get your free copy here: http://desktop.google.com