Google's Desktop Search is out of beta and available for download. (Going Gold is a phrase from "back in the day" when software ready to be release would be put onto a "gold" master for reproduction and shipping.)

The final version adds support for the text in PDF files, and meta data from music, video and picture files. System requirements are Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 3 and above, 500 MBytes of disk space, 128 MBytes of RAM, and a 400 MHz processor.

But wait, there's more.

Specifically there's a new API, allowing the creation of plug-ins like the searching of faxes and chats. Google is trying to get the open source community active in enhancing desktop search, which is very cool indeed. More about all this at http://desktop.google.com/apis

One more important point. Google Desktop Search now understands Chinese and Korean. Interesting choices. Korea has the highest broadband penetration of any country, China has the largest (and fastest growing) base of users, but Korean is an alphabetic language and Chinese pictographic (I'm assuming they're talking Mandarin here). Japanese and Arabic users, I suspect, will have to roll their own through the APIs.