Alternate Method - Using Google Desktop to track and monitor the activity on your computer

Posted on March 11, 2007 at 8:06 pm

I just read my post about trying to monitor what activity is occurring on your computer and realized that its way too complicated to get working and even if you get it working, it’ll probably be far too tedious to go scrolling through a bunch of security events!!! So here’s a much easier, more user friendly and an even better way to track and monitor your computer’s activity.

And it’s always nice when it’s free! Our program that will help us in this is Google Desktop. You’ve probably already heard of this program because it helps you search your computer super fast. Actually some people have said it’s too good and brings up too many results! And it lets you search for anything, including emails, photos, videos, files, web history, etc! So this search capability inherently has to keep track of EVERYTHING in order to provide this great results, which means it can also be used to just monitor activity in a timeline format.

The really great thing about Google Desktop is that it has a Timeline option which you can browse through by date and see ALL the things that happened that day - which files were accessed, all the web browsing history (with graphics and text of the web pages), and any emails sent or received in Outlook or GMail! And all you have to do is install the application and click a few buttons and you’re done!!!

First download the application from here:

http://desktop.google.com/

Click Agree and Download and follow the instructions (they’re pretty easy). You may have to restart your computer. You should now see a small twirly icon of yellow, red, blue and green in your taskbar.

Double click on the icon and it’ll load up the search webpage (if this is the first time you are starting Google Desktop, it may ask you about some advanced features and whether or not you want to enable it or not). Now it’ll take some time for the application to index all the files and emails on your computer, so wait a little while and keep checking the Index Status by clicking on the link.

Once the indexing is done, go ahead and browse a few web pages, send out some emails and open a couple of Word files or a couple of photos. Then wait a couple of minutes and double click on the Google Desktop icon in the taskbar again. This time go to Browse Timeline and you should see all the things you just did sitting right there in front of you!!! And if you want you can choose to filter the data to just see emails or web history, etc!!!

On the right hand side you’ll see a calendar from which you can pick a particular date and see the data just for that date. So using Google Desktop you can monitor web browsing history even if someone goes in and clears out the history in Internet Explorer because Google Desktop caches all of the data independently of IE!

So hopefully your kids or whoever you are trying to spy on don’t read this article too or else they can simply right click on the icon and tell Google Desktop to shut itself off! So if you’re really trying to be sneaky, then you’re in need of some commercial software that can hide itself completely…but hopefully this is enough for most people!

Any questions, post a comment!

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