Extend Google Desktop Search Filetypes with GDSPlus

Scott Kingery writes about GDSPlus, which allows you to specify what extensions the Google Desktop Search (GDS) tool will index. This includes the ability to add new text extensions not yet supported by Google, such as:

• .XML
  
  
• .log (mIRC and Trillian)
  
  
• .cs, .vb (Visual Studio .NET source code files)
  
  
• .frm, .bas, .cls (Visual Basic 6 source code files)

Basically, any ASCII text document can be now be indexed by allowing you to specify the file extensions of those documents. This does not add additional support for other filetype like Adobe PDF documents in other words. Additionally, you can also remove support for any of the extensions that Google included and you do not want indexed.



GDSPlus can be downloaded for free at http://www.trivex.net/



This software does not come with an installer, so it is important that you follow instructions in the readme.txt file. The installation process calls for clearing your current Google Desktop data, editing a Windows Registry entry and then reindexing your hard drive.



Be forewarned, GDSPlus is a replacement for your GoogleDesktopCrawl.exe and GoogleDesktopIndex.exe files from Google. The current version of GDS is v.100504 and should be the only version of Google Desktop Search Beta available right now.



If Google updates GDS in the future, then you will more than probably have to get your update from GDSPlus instead of Google if you want to continue to have the extra filetype support. It may come to pass that Google will add this functionality into GDS in the future though.



While GDSPlus only supports text filetypes and does not add other types (Google will have to do that), Scott has noticed that you can still index the filenames of other filetypes such as .wav, .rar, .png, etc. It does not index the contents of the files, just the filenames themselves.