Google's PC search tool

One of the great conundrums of personal computing is that it's often easier to find something in the vast reaches of the Internet than on your own measly hard drive. Making it easier to search the PC is one of the big promises of Longhorn, the next version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, and its new WinFS file system.

But Longhorn isn't due until 2006. And now it looks like Internet search king Google will have a hard-drive search tool on the market well before then, in what could become a serious challenge to Microsoft. We published this story by John Markoff of The New York Times in the P-I this morning, via the New York Times news service. (Free registration is required to see the full version on the NY Times site.)

Reaction to the Google project, code-named "Puffin," has been across the board this morning. "How cool is that!" writes Colin Faulkingham on his Noise & More weblog. On the other end of the spectrum, Rafat Ali of PaidContent.org calls it "just pre-IPO hype, with John Markoff as the clear conduit of this calculated leak."