Tags: Microsoft

MSN Desktop Search is quite capable

It now feels amazing how we have lived without this particular feature since ages now. Google introduced desktop searching to the world in spite of the fact lesser-known products existed since a long time. It also came as a wakeup call to the competition in Microsoft and Yahoo! who quickly announced that they are working on similar products.

While, we wait for Yahoo! to come out with their X1 based product… Microsoft have kept their promise and released their desktop search tool before the end of the year. It comes as a part of the MSN Toolbar Suite beta and is accessible from three separate places. It installs itself as a toolbar in Microsoft Outlook, optional Deskbar version and of course in the Windows Explorer.

As with other desktop search products, it requires a client software to be running in background all the time to keep the database updated with latest content on the hard disk. Initial tests showed that the crawlers consumed way too much memory. However, once the entire system is indexed, the memory requirement got better.

It is again frustrating that MSN Desktop Search only supports Outlook and Outlook Express for email searching. Having used Lookout, I am sure Microsoft would be doing a good job of e-mail searching. However, for users of alternative mail clients like Opera M2 and Thunderbird, it would come as a disappointment.

Microsoft has done a good job with desktop search. They use the browser window for showing search results (it is integrated with MSN Beta Search), though the result window is not a web page per say. Thus, support for alternative browsers for search result display is again out of the question. Firefox showed the Desktop link on the MSN Beta Search webpage but did not let me search through it.

Searching is very comprehensive compared to Google Desktop Search with support for tons of file formats. It adds an additional toolbar to the desktop search window to search for various file types. The broad criteria being Everything, Documents, Email, Music, Picture/Videos etc. more sub options are available to further classify the search result. The file details are changed as per the search criteria. Music search shows the Artist Name, Album Name and so on, while Image Search would display Dimensions and Date Taken etc.

Interestingly Microsoft have avoided going into IM Conversation Logs and Browsing History. There are no details from the company if they plan to incorporate that in the near future. However, knowing the controversies it managed to raise with Google Desktop Search, I doubt they would replicate that feature. Microsoft has however taken care to keep user privacy in mind. It takes care of Windows OS privileges while searching. Mail searching takes place for that particular profile only which the user is logged in with. This should give some relief to the computer privacy advocates.

Overall, the product is pretty impressive. I read in an online review that Microsoft claims that this is the first desktop search which let user search through PDF files (with an add-on) but Copernic Desktop Search has done it since a long time. Maybe they need to look beyond Google for competition. A lot of alternative applications exist which go way beyond what Microsoft offers, dtSearch is one of them. For a normal user especially if he prefers Microsoft products for email and work would find MSN Desktop Search very capable. However, he would need a good system with a lot of RAM and at least a 17-inch monitor to run it efficiently.