Technofile: Over the last couple of years software makers have been coming up with more and more applications designed to "gadgetise" your PC. The idea is to make it more useful in dealing with everyday life.

Google's approach has been to produce a version of its search engine technology for your PC. Its desktop search tool came out in the spring. This week a new version was released offering features such as integration with Microsoft Outlook, a "sidebar" with cleaver tools to display photos, news headlines and much more.

The move is significant, not only because this promises to make using a PC and accessing all your stuff just a little bit easier, but because the folks over at Microsoft and Yahoo! are also interested in doing exactly the same thing.

And Google is making them nervous. So nervous in fact that some are even speculating that Google might produce its own operating system to rival Windows.

But in the meantime, we have the "widget wars".

Google Desktop Search is a small application which will index your hard drive and make it pretty easy to find things. This is very handy because, although useful, bigger and bigger hard drives create annoyingly large spaces in which to lose your documents.

So search on the desktop is the biggest widget of them all right now. Apple has created the Spotlight feature in the latest version of its Tiger system, which indexes e-mails as well. Google's newest desktop tool does the same with Gmail accounts.

Google also has a "sidebar" that provides quick access to search and comes pre-loaded with seven other features: e-mail; personalised news; RSS feeds; a notepad; photos; "quick view" access to frequently used web pages and files; "what's hot"; and stocks and shares news.

Google's sidebar also gives Google some significant real estate on the desktop, which might come in handy for them later, perhaps to display advertising.

It hopes programmers will start to produce other widgets for the sidebar, in the same way that Yahoo! now offers similar things since its acquisition of Konfabulator.

One direction these widgets might take is to combine maps and satellite imagery. And guess what?

Google has Google Maps and Google Earth to do just that.

Google has not stopped at small widgets, however. This week it also released Google Talk, instant messaging (IM) software which also offers the ability to make voice calls between computers (you'll need a Gmail account) over the internet.

This makes the search giant even more competitive with engines such as Yahoo! and MSN, not to mention AOL.

But if Google is not your thing, there are others queuing up to offer you search gadgets for your desktop.

Blinkx.com's Desktop Search, a free download, displays searches on your hard drive and web matches as fast as you can type.

Blinkx is one to watch in the search space. Another competitor is Copernic Desktop Search, also free, which hunts down files and e-mail on local drives.

Over at Yahoo!, its Desktop Search also contains an integrated audio/video player, and performs lightning-quick searches. But since its release, the beta version has been unreliable, though by all accounts it is improving.

Gradually it is converging with Yahoo!'s other products to create a suite of tools, such as IM.

The widget wars have only just begun. Luckily, punters like you and me can only benefit.