The battle is on for your desktop. If it's anything like many previous computer wars, it will be fought with features as the primary weapons. Microsoft used features to help it become the leader in word processing, spreadsheets and operating systems.

So, of course, when the Redmond, Wash.-based software fighting machine squares off against Google in the battle to search your desktop, we would expect it to use features as its main weapon.

Amazingly, that doesn't look like the case.

In its first attempt to win the war, Microsoft is relying on better security. With all the harsh criticism that is flung at Microsoft about lack of security in Windows, it has been seen that Google's desktop search is so insecure that touting better security will help Microsoft win. For now, Microsoft gets my vote for desktop search beta products (at least over Google) -- because its new desktop search is less insecure than Google's.

The problem with the Google beta offering is that it puts users at far more risk than they can imagine.

It looks safe because it's from Google and looks so much like the Google search engine that users love so much. But looks can be deceiving. The Google desktop search tool doesn't just retrieve far flung Web pages so you can view them, like its search engine does. You don't care whether those show you improper, private information. Rather, it is gathering info from your own system and making it even easier prey to outsiders than it is normally.

The Google desktop search product creates an index listing every item on your disk drive that it can recognize, including your word processing documents and e-mail. It uses this index much like you use the index in the back of a book to find the required information quickly. However, it makes no distinction between secure information and nonsecure information.

Let's say that you have filled out a form online with your credit card number. When you do, your browser will make a copy of that page on your disk in a folder for temporary Internet files. The Google engine includes these temp files in the index. If one of your co-workers uses your system for a Google desktop search, and the keywords happen to be on that "cached" page, he'll have access to your credit card. The same problem happens with any other secure information in any file that the Google desktop search product recognizes.

Another Google desktop search security problem is that it doesn't really take out pre-indexed information, even if you have stopped indexing a particular type of document. It just makes it invisible.

Microsoft has addressed both of these issues. Its new beta desktop search tool does not automatically include temporary Internet files (a k a cached pages) in its index. Additionally, if you delete an e-mail from your system, the Microsoft tool is smart enough to remove all references from its index. Both of these capabilities protect you. Microsoft also restricts access to the index depending on who is logged in, so other users cannot see your data.

Let's hope that Microsoft's next version goes even further to protect your privacy and security, and hold the line on features until that's done. It should let you choose which Outlook folders to include, whether to include Outlook notes, journal entries, e-mail and appointment as separately selectable items, and perhaps even allow you to restrict indexing of Outlook items based on which categories are associated with each item.

That would be acceptable security. Until then, by loading these desktop search tools, you'll be lowering your data privacy.