Mumbai: Google Inc had created a web software that runs both online, and offline, by letting users work anywhere – even in the most remote locations.

Using a technology called Google Gears users of computers, phones and other devices can manipulate web services like e-mail, online calendars or news readers whether online, intermittently connected to the web or completely offline.

This will narrow the gulf between new web services and the desktop software, where any data changes are stored locally on users'' machines.

Google is thus pushing the net into new spheres of activity and posing a challenge to rival Microsoft Corp., leader in the desktop software era.

Google plans to make the `Gears'' technology available for free as "open source" software, helping other developers to freely use and enhance the software in their own products.

Gears will expand the usage of scores of Google products and services, as well as thousands of programmes from independent software makers, by making them more accessible at previously inconvenient times and places.

The technology also allows developers to build internet search and indexing of web pages into their own software applications.

Google''s full Web search functions would return once the user reconnects to the internet.

Early partners who will use Gears in their products include design software leader Adobe Systems Inc., maker of Flash animation and Acrobat document-sharing software, as well as new Apollo tools that work online and offline, Adobe said.

Other organisations working with Google are Norway''s Opera Software ASA, maker of a web browser popular with mobile phone users, and Mozilla, the group behind Firefox, the biggest alternative to Microsoft''s Internet Explorer browser, according to Google.