Google Gears –the search giant’s open-source system for allowing offline access to Web applications — celebrated its one-year anniversary Wednesday with an announcement by MySpace. The social-networking site, owned by News Corp., will use Gears to search and sort user messages. This is the largest implementation of the Gears technology.

MySpace users will be invited to download Gears when they visit their mailbox, said Allen Hurff, MySpace’s senior vice president of engineering, at the Google I/O conference. While Google has promoted the chief benefit of Gears as allowing users to access their data even when offline — a critical feature, since Internet access is far from ubiquitous in the U.S. — MySpace is not yet taking advantage of that capability.

The chief benefit right now is dramatically improving performance for MySpace’s messaging system and enabling functions like search and sorting that the current system is unable to provide. Another benefit is the cost savings of moving all those client-server communications and processing to users’ machines.

Faster, Smarter Messaging

With Gears — Google also announced it has dropped the corporate branding from the name, presumably to beef up its open-source credentials — programmers can use JavaScript to exploit three core functions: a local database, a local server for caching objects, and a thread pool that allows actions and events to take place in the background. MySpace takes advantage of all of these features to dramatically improve performance and offer new capabilities.

On the TechCrunch blog, Michael Arrington explained the difference between the old and new systems. “Instead of scrolling through pages and pages of messages, users can now sort by date, from, status (read/unread), or subject. And, more importantly, users can also search the full text of messages. The results are shown instantly (think Outlook), without page refreshes.”

In addition to the improved user experience,…