NYT: Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft

Just when analysts seemed to start to discount the threat Microsoft brings to the search game, Google is readying plans to invade the desktop in a major way. The New York Times reports that the search giant is readying an application that would give Microsoft Windows the sort of search capabilities that Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been unsuccessfully trying to bake into the software for about ten years.

Microsoft had hoped to introduce these features in Longhorn, a release not slated to be released for another couple of years. (The Times piece failed to note recent developments, where Microsoft announced these search functions would be some years off even from that late date. If all goes well, Microsoft's search technology would be introduced at the system level in 2009, according to CNET reports.)

The Google application, code-named Puffin, has been beta tested internally at the Google offices for about a year. A Macintosh search tool that uses APIs to web content as well as hard disk data was introduced by Apple Computer about four years ago to great fanfare, but it has seen relatively little use since. There is no guarantee that either Google's application or the developing Microsoft one will prove at all popular.

Google sources told the times that the search application was one of several business lines Google is pursuing in an effort to defensively build "sticky" businesses, where users tend to stick with the technology they first adopt and like.