This paper discusses the emerging trend of Personal Desktop Searching utilities on desktop PCs, and how the information cached and stored with these systems can be retrieved and analysed, even after the original documenthas been removed. Focusing on the free Google Desktop Search program, this paper first analyses how the program operates, the processes involved, files created and altered, and methods on retrieving this data without corrupting the contents. The limitations of extracting data from Google Desktop Search have also been discussed,along with some future work in the area.
