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Microsoft's Upcoming Desktop Search Tool
Back in July, Microsoft purchased a company called Lookout who made a tool that allowed users of Outlook 2000+ to search through their email at greater speed and accuracy to the standard Outlook search tool. Since Microsoft acquired Lookout, the MSN team have been steadily working on Desktop Search and web search technologies. Google announced their own Desktop Search technology recently; the tool is fast but is limited in capabilities.The MSN Toolbar Suite integrates directly throughout the OS and varies according to where you're searching from. For example, if you're searching from within Windows Explorer you will search on your PC, in IE on the web and in Outlook the toolbar searches within Outlook. The bottom line : like the new online search, Microsoft have made a very good effort to get back in the game.
Does 'Beta' mean anything to you? If people want these features, and make them know, they'll be added.
By buying a company. How like them.
Um most big corporations expand through acquisition. Apple did it too, see itunes, logic audio, shake.
music lover since 1969
IMHO Microsoft and Apple are both playing catch up, but with the advantage that they own their respective operating systems.
BTW: I don't consider any of these products or the concepts behind them particularly insightful. Just about anyone who uses computers daily in their business could have dreamed up the feature sets. Implementation itself is trickier, but Copernic, X1 and Google all demonstrate that there's no shortage of developers who know how to carry out the harder tasks.
Give credit where credit is due.
GUIs are playing catch-up again. "locate" has been around on Unix platforms for, what, 20 or 30 years? And, it does wildcard searches for filenames, ready to jam into grep for content search.
Content could be indexed, but its a bit project specific (so us Unix heads only do it on specific projects, right?).
For the un-initiated, a process runs (typically once a day), and indexes all filenames on your system. You can then get instant answers to "Show me all Microsoft Word documents on my system"
file `locate *.doc` | grep Microsoft
and many other queries. This stuff is PLAIN ORDINARY UNIX/LINUX. Ah well, doesn't help the completely casual user. You know, "If the option isn't clearly presented, it can't possibly be done -- or I just don't want to bother".
More power to 'em, them -- but people PLEASE don't ask when this will be ported to Linux/Unix!
Ratboy.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
4. Wildcard searches - oftentimes I just can't remember how I've saved the file. Was my presentation called group4project.ppt or group4.ppt or G4.ppt? A simple search of *4*.ppt should find the file, where * is a wildcard. Currently I can't do that.
Cygwin: locate -i *g*4*.ppt
5. No automatic unindexing. I just moved 3000 files from my desktop to another folder. Now whenever I search for any of those files I get two results, one of them pointing to a non-existing location. There's no way in hell I'm removing 3000 files from the index manually, ten at a time.
Cygwin: updatedb --localpaths="/cygdrive/c /cygdrive/d"
(I have this in an alias. Of course this doesn't index content like what you are talking about, it updates the 'locate' database. I'm just talking efficient search of filenames here. It would be nice, though, to have a simple, fast CLI like 'locate' that does content. Although grep can be reasonable unless you're doing the whole disk.)
My life is so much more efficient since I discovered Cygwin. It's not for Grandma, but for anyone with an inkling of a technical bent it's heaven and 10-100x faster than going thru all the pointy-clicky stuff.