The Google Desktop Search application is, for all of its truly outstanding features, lacking in one particular area. Although it can search through every website you ever visit, taking the logs and adding them to your total searchable index as cached pages, it can only do this if you have used Internet Explorer as your browser. Not if your browser of choice is Mozilla Firefox, which it is for an ever growing multitude of searchers.

However (call it serendipity perhaps), only a few weeks ago, Ken Schutte, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched version 0.2.2. of Slogger, an extension to the Mozilla FireFox v.1.0 browser.

Today, Jon Udell, Strategic Developer, InfoWorld Columnist and respected technology blogger, discovered Slogger and made mention of its capabilities in an article on his blog, entitled Firefox history in Google Desktop Search. Jon Udell also left a message in Kevin Schutte's Visitors Book, highlighting this discovery and how it could solve the yawning gap.

This is potentially wonderful news for new Google Desktop Search users who wish to stick with Firefox. But there is a great deal more to Slogger than its ability to work with Google Desktop.

Slogger creates a complete backup and time-based log of your browsing history on your hard-drive in a highly customizable way, enabling you to:

• Retrieve a page, or any number of pages, offline that you previously saw when you were online (pack-and-go reading for offline journeys)


• See a page as it was when you first saw it, not as it is now


• Look back and read the news stories you were reading at this moment in history


• Analyze detailed stats of the pages you view for your own research

"The basic operation is to save each page in the same way as the "Save Page As" command found in browsers, as well as append some log info to a plain text log file. (which you can format as HTML, XML, etc.). This can be done automatically or on request. Filenames and log info can be set using variables automatically, or you can edit/change them in a popup when page is logged. Actual saving of pages can be disabled, so that it can serve as a customizable history manager. The goal is to make Slogger highly configurable."

Whether you want to extend Google's Desktop Search to webpages you've viewed with Firefox, or just want to keep an offline archive, Slogger is in the right place, at the right time.

Recommended.