The battle for search-technology supremacy extended to new front today when Microsoft launched a tool for finding files stored on personal computers.

The software giant is the second company to launch a desktop search tool after Google released its version in October. Google hopes that its early position will confer an advantage in an increasingly crowded marketplace. Last week Yahoo! said its would launch a similar service in January and Ask Jeeves, another search provider, said that it would launch its own product later this week.

Microsoft and Google have made their desktop search tools available as free downloads; the technology is seen as a way of attracting more users to other money-making search services.

"Our ambition for search is to provide the ultimate information tool that can find anything you're looking for," Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president at the software giant's MSN Internet division said.

Last month Microsoft launched a test version of its own web-search programme. Microsoft hopes that the software will increase its share of the rapidly expanding paid-search online advertising market, in which Google is the runaway leader. Paid search - where advertisers are charged a fee for having their website displayed when a user searches for certain keywords - is estimated to be worth around $5 billion a year.

So far Microsoft has used technology developed by Yahoo! to power the search facilities included on its MSN website.

Microsoft is deploying its new desktop search tool through a set of different toolbars that can be installed on the Windows desktop, the Internet Explorer browser and within Office Outlook, the e-mail programme.

The toolbar suite, which was launched in beta, or test, mode yesterday, can be downloaded from www.beta.toolbar.msn.com.

Analysts have said that other Microsoft products, most notably the Windows operating system, could be threatened if Google were to use its lead in search services to move into other computer and software areas.

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