Things to know about Google Desktop - Pausing and Stopping

Posted on March 16, 2007 at 3:18 pm

I’m a big fan of Google Desktop because I hate it when I visit a web site and forget to bookmark it only to waste time later on trying to find the site again! The Browse Timeline feature is a great way to look through your own history and see everything you’ve done.

But what if you really don’t want Google Desktop to record everything you do all the time!? Some people might take this as a privacy issue and not install the application thinking fearing that Google will have a record of everything they do. Well first off, the Google Desktop program creates an index on your personal computer that is not accessible by Google. All the data is stored locally and is not transmitted to Google.

Secondly, Google has incorporated features into the program that give you complete control over your privacy. For example, there is a feature called Pause Indexing that will tell Desktop to stop indexing the stuff you are looking at. It will not save or cache anything for those 15 minutes.

Click on the Google Desktop icon in the taskbar and choose Pause Indexing from the Indexing menu option.

You can also simply choose Exit if you want to turn off the indexing completely, but then it won’t come back on automatically unless you restart your computer.

One other privacy feature, which is useful if you have friends or family over and they ask you to use your computer and you know they are the snoopy type, then you can prevent others from doing a Desktop search on your computer by choosing the Lock Search option from the menu above. If they try to do a search, they are presented with the search page and a message stating it’s locked!