I tried Google's new desktop app for Windows, and I'll never search the old way again

Google has officially released its new desktop application for Windows, making a previously experimental tool available to all users. The core innovation is its activation method: pressing Alt-Space instantly opens a search bubble that overlays any current window, eliminating the need to open a browser. This provides rapid access to Google Search, the Gemini AI assistant, and Google Lens. Crucially, the app is deeply integrated with a user's Google ecosystem, allowing it to search personal data within Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Photos to answer specific, context-aware questions.

In practice, the app excels at pulling precise information from a user's digital life. A reviewer successfully used it to find basketball game seat details from an email, locate a school event's time and place, and identify recent photos of a specific person from Google Photos. The screen-capture Lens feature can also copy text from images or help explain on-screen content, like math homework. However, the AI is not infallible; it sometimes retrieves incorrect information from documents, as evidenced when it failed to accurately list ingredients from a known recipe file in Drive. While it can find files on your computer by name, it lacks the ability to perform more intuitive searches for recently downloaded items.