The beta version of Google's heralded desktop search feature has a flaw: third parties may be able to access the search results giving them acess to a lot of knowledge about what's on the user's personal computer according to a study conducted at Rice University.

Members of the Rice University science department discovered that snipets of data from the files of the user becomes embedded in Google's regular web searches by the local search engine.

'This began as a student project to study how Google Desktop worked and to see if there were any security flaws,' said Professor Dan Wallach of Rice University. 'We started by wondering how Google did the local search integration. Once we figured out how it worked, it wasn't too much extra work to break it.'

Google quickly fixed the glitch by adding an update which was provided to users as an automatic update feature.

Users can determine if they have the corrected version by looking at the 'about' page on their Google desktop browser task bar. If the version number is 121,004 or above, they have the corrected version of the program.