Is Beagle a Good Thing?

[Timothy Murphy]

I sometimes find when my laptop becomes very slow
and I run "top" to see what is happening
that the culprit is "beagled-helper".

I don't recall ever starting beagled,
and it does not seem to be listed by chkconfig.

Is it now a standard part of Fedora?
Is it mandatory to run it?
What exactly does it do?

"man beagled" says it is "a system for searching 
and managing your personal information space",
which I don't find very informative, or convincing.