Google Desktop Search has made it's way out of beta and is now a released product. It looks like it has become way more flexible, too. The biggest complaint I had was the lack of file extension support, which was sort of tied to the fact that there was no SDK. They re-architected this area, and now have support for plugins (including, a Trillian plugin) and allow developers to create plugins via the SDK. More information on developing plugins can be found here. They also expanded the default set of files that are indexed to include (among others) MP3 and PDF files. I also really love the DeskBar to gain easy access to searches.

My buddy, Rich Werning, and I were talking about some possible plugins that we may develop after we convert the SDK files to Delphi:

• ZIP plugin - Scan through ZIP files to find items inside a ZIP
• Blog/FeedDemon plugin - Search your locally downloaded blog entries, and have it take you to the original author's page when an item is found
• Database plugin - Not entirely certain on this one, but if you provided a full connection string, maybe you could search a DB schema for fields/tables/etc. Or maybe even search a table for specific text.

I'll certainly blog anything we do on this front.