Back in June the Mountain View giant Google released the first Linux flavor of Google Desktop, its desktop searching solution which is supposed to bring the power of the famous search engine in offline mode. Although most of the Google technologies are only compatible with Windows-equipped systems, the company seems to be fully prepared to evolve into the Linux industry using Google Desktop. Today, Jim Zhuang, Software Engineer, presents Google Desktop for Linux 1.1 Beta, a new release of the application which comes with several improvements.

Among the most requested features, the Mountain View company decided to implement support for Microsoft Office documents which now allows Google Desktop to include this type of files in the results provided by the application.

But what's more important is that Google entered the Linux domain using the consumers' contribution which is famous for the support offered to the Linux development.

"Feedback from people like you shaped this update. Because many people wanted to search and launch applications, we added that functionality to the product. Desktop for Linux now supports many more image formats and will show better thumbnails for them in your search results. You can also customize the hotkey used to launch the quick search box. And most importantly, Desktop for Linux now searches the content of Microsoft Office documents - our most requested feature," Jim Zhuang, Software Engineer, wrote on the Google Desktop blog.

Google Desktop for Linux offers almost the same functions as the other flavors of the application including Gmail and web history searching, quick search box, Google integration, multi-language support and smart indexing. The new beta version of Google Desktop for Linux allows the consumers to configure the quick search key using their own keyboard shortcut.

Obviously, you can download the latest version of Google Desktop for Linux straight from Softpedia using this link.