Searching Other Computers on Your Network

Google Desktop isn't limited to searching your PC's hard disk. You can also use it to search other computers on your wireless or Ethernet network.

To use Google Desktop across multiple computers on a network, you must have a Google account (just one) and you must have copies of Google Desktop installed on all computers you want to include in the search. The reason you need a Google account is that each computer's index is transmitted via the Internet to Google's servers; when you search "across computers" you're actually searching the index for your network, as stored on Google's servers.

Tip

Since the index information for all your PCs is stored on Google's servers, you can use this feature to view your desktop PC's files and messages from your laptop PC when you're on the roador vice versa. Just make sure that Google Desktop is running on both PCs, and that they're both connected to the Internet.

To set up Google Desktop to search across multiple computers, follow these steps:

1.	Open Google Desktop and click the Desktop Preferences link. (Alternatively, you can right-click the Google Desktop icon in the Windows system tray, and select Preferences from the pop-up menu.)
2.	When the Preferences page appears, click Gmail and Search Across Computers.
3.	When the next page appears, as shown in Figure 32.13, check the Index and Search My Documents and Viewed Web Pages Across All My Computers option. Figure 32.13. Configuring Google Desktop to search across multiple computers.
4.	Enter a name for this computer.
5.	Check which items from this PC you want to be able to search from other PCs: documents and web history, documents only, web history only, or nothing. (The "nothing" option lets this computer search other computers, but doesn't let them search this PC.)
6.	Click the Save Preferences button. You'll need to repeat these steps for each computer you want to include in the Google Desktop search. You'll also need to log onto the same Google account on each PC; this is how Google keeps track of the computers to include in the search index.