What's that you say? Read the manual?

Since I don't have access to my XP box right now I sent Dave Winer a query about how the Google Desktop Search results are included with web results. He suggested it might be a Javascript include. A reasonable possibility but I didn't find mention of a need to run Javascript in the browser to use GDS. There is a page in the manual - who would have thought, actually read the manual - that describes the integration this way: "Wait a minute. How can web search return a page containing both www.google.com and Google Desktop Search results?

When Google Desktop Search is integrated with Google web search, what you're really doing is sending your query to two different programs and places. One copy of your query goes to www.google.com, which searches only the web and returns a page with those results to your computer. Another copy of your query goes to the Google Desktop Search application running on your computer, which searches only its cache on your computer for results. Google Desktop Search also intercepts www.google.com's results page before you can see it, changes it to include the Google Desktop Search results, and then lets your web browser show it to you. Google never knows what your Google Desktop Search results are."

So it appears it's both very cool software and well implemented so as to avoid the insecurity of sending personal data over the wire.