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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.
So what they're saying, is that when it comes installed in with Longhorn, we can't uninstall it?
The MSN Toolbar Suite integrates directly throughout the OS...
Didn't Internet Explorer teach them that integrating something that connects to the web, like this, into the OS is bad? I'm just waiting for a security hole to pop up and leave even more reason to bash Windows security.
Well, atleast this is optional, unlike IE.
At least Google has announced that it is going to make the effort to get its desktop search to support Firefox, Thunderbird, and maybe other third-party products.
I would be very surprised if Microsoft makes this work with anything other then their products.
I can't wait for the next generation of viruses which will spawn from this. Is this a recipe for disaster or what:
Just as well. I was tired of hearing about new IE exploits every day. This should break up the monotony.
HBH"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
I mean, lots of people jokingly refer to "Outlook" as "LookOut" (i.e. for viruses/etc.)? There is actually a company/product called "Lookout" for Outlook?
/. crowd)... Why would they make the filesystem a database if it weren't to allow searching the whole system in some organized manner? And MS was talking about this stuff LONG before I ever heard of Spotlight... Maybe for once (well, excepting pre-emptive multitasking or true multi-user systems, which Apple was talking about for far too long until Jobs kicked their butts and spurred the creation of OS X at long last) MS got to something before Apple?
;)
Also-- to the people who are pointing out (and/or will point out) that this sounds like Apple's "Spotlight" tech... I personally loathe Microsoft, but I DO recall them speaking about making the entire filesystem one big relational database (and I recall the mixed reactions among the
Of course, this being Microsoft, they probably took the idea from someone else first
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Remember back in the dotcom hayday, everyone and their brother was rushing out to make a new portal? You know, the all-in-one start page for the browser -- stock quotes, weather, sports scores, yadda-yadda. I think it was an attempt to clone the (then) success of AOL. Search engine firms became media companies. Now, these media companies are trying to get back into the search engine fray.
Why? Because the ad dollars that were once banner impressions from billions of page impressions, are now far cheaper than they were back then (revenues are down from them), and now pay-per-click revenues are super-duper high. Remember, this isn't about making software for the greater good of man, these companies are in it to win it.
So anyway, here we are again. Searching your desktop. Web based mail. Yesterday's AOL is today's Google. Personally, a lot of these tools are overhyped, in my opinion. I really hope that these companies have more forward looking people, instead of just sideways looking (i.e. at competition). Because when contextual text-based ads start losing their value, it'll just happen all over again, and we may be talking about the search engine wars the same way we look back at the portal wars.
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like the new online search, Microsoft have made a very good effort to get back in the game.
What game is that?
Follow The Innovator?
What google includes is hardly spyware, in the google toolbar you have an option not to install it. Microsoft software sends useage statistics and such back, and some software usage is reported without warning or permission, to a certification system.
Google is quite open and honest with what it includes in it's software, less so than Microsoft can be.
Sure they are still a monopoly but competition is competition. The only way Microsoft can really dethrone google is if they come out with a better internet search engine. If we get a improved system and outlook search, all the better. I really hope that this gives Linux the kick in the pants it needs for someone to come up with better system search solutions. Find is absolutely terrible in my humble opinion, especially it's tendency to freeze up when you stop a search. Lack of metadata search makes baby Linus cry. Bring me browser wars! Bring me os wars! Bring me search wars! These are the only kind of conflicts in which the consumer benefits, so we might as well encourage them!
It sounds like MSFT are on the defensive, rather than the offensive.
Although now that I think about it, they never really innovated anyway - so I guess they were never truly on the offensive.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
...by buying other companies. Microsoft talks a lot about "their" innovations yet if you look at who they bought over the last 10 years its obvious that almost everything they put out is someone else's product.
btw before you think I'm just some MS hater I guess I should state I'm not against the practice nor Microsoft's products in general. If the end result is a good product then who cares how it was made. Just wanted to point out that its a bit ironic that people expect brand new innovative products from the ground up from OSS yet don't give a single thought to the fact that almost everything MS puts out wasn't developed in-house at first and they rely almost soley on outsiders for many of their innovations and ideas.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Perhaps they dumped WinFS, previously known as 'NT Object Filing System', because this will do most of what it did with less of a hassle in programming and backward compatibility?
And - where is the role of metadata in all of this?
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
With the OS, Outlook, and searching integrated, I forsee entire personal mailboxes being accidentally searchable by the rest of the world. The best part will be that's it'll the default configuration.
...if I wanted to read garbage like that, I'd go to \.
I think they learned a lot from bundling internet explorer. They learned that if they tie some specialty app into the OS, bundle it with every Microsoft product, and require people to use it to get MS proprietary content, they can go from a niche player to 95% market share in a couple of years. That tactic worked for IE, worked for Outlook Express, worked for Windows Media Player, it's starting to work for MSN messenger, and it'll probably work for their new search tool, too.
0 1 - just my two bits
cheer microsoft on their bold attempt, as frankly Google Desktop Search blows. Before I get modded -1, troll, let me say I am a big fan of google. I'm just unhappy with google's take on what a desktop search should be.
Let me count the ways in which GDS annoys me:
0. Lack of support for programs I use (Firefox support? Pretty please?)
1. When a a folder has the same name as my search term, google search will display *all* files within that folder. For example if I search for 'doom 3' it won't just list the files called 'doom 3' it will list *all* the files in the doom 3 folder. It would be much more useful if it would only display the folder once as a separate search result, and then only display files called 'doom 3'
2. Inability to only search for filenames *only* - sometimes, or actually most of the time, I want to find a specific file. I know I have created important.doc but when I search for 'important' I get a plethora of results featuring different documents / text files which have the word 'important' within them. Windows' search has done this nicely by giving me the ability to search for a 'all or a part of the filename' and for 'a word or a phrase within the file'. I also have the option to 'look in' which brings me to my next point
3. Inability to search within a folder - because sometimes it is extremely useful to look for *.mp3 in my very disorganized 'thereShouldBeNoMusicHere' folder. Or to look for anything at all in a drive different than C...
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.
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.
The generic search that comes with Windows does a much better job, IMHO. I hope they improve on GDS in the future, because I'd like to googlize my computer some more.
I would be extremely surprised if Microsoft would support those, and just make thier desktop search support their own godforsaken applications.
I wonder if there is any off-line search engine like X1, Copernic, or that one, for Windows that support search plugins via some kind of API. So a developer can add e.g. mp3 ID3 tag search, DVD metadata search and other things like that. If MS is going where I think they're going, they'll just drown in the bunch of desktop search engines with nothing new to offer. I can't see why not even Google was thinking of this when they designed theirs. Right, we're supposed to wait for a single company to let me search for what I want efficiently? That feels so... err, stone age.
A feature like that would be great and certainly an idea for Mozilla.org as an upcoming open source project -- read another article here that they were looking into this area.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
"Lookout"...
...
Isn't that the name of their email client?
Ah... no - it's just what I call it.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
I've been running both for a while now. Some observations:
Google Desktop supports Unicode which is invaluable if you use non-ASCII languages, like my wife does. YMMV. However the Google Desktop search is not integrated into the Outlook shell (understandably) nor the Google Deskbar, which I think is an obvious oversight - and suggested as much to Google.
Lookout allows you to index mapped drive letters or network locations, which Google Desktop doesn't. This is great for me where I have documents on a laptop's local hard drive as well as on network shares. I can't quantify it, but I think it has slowed down my Outlook 2003 a little, particularly on start-up. Most hits are returned in less than a tenth of a second. My major gripe about Lookout is that when I move items from my inbox to my PST it stuffs up the index - I know it rebuilds the full index once a month, but more often than not I look for something that has been indexed as being in my Inbox, yet I have since moved it to this month's PST folder. Nonetheless, it gives me a clue what to look for in my PST. I predominantly use Lookout for Outlook at work, and can't really comment on how this compares to using Google Desktop search on a "busy" Outlook mailbox.
Both systems use the CPU power of your workstation to build the indexes when idle. I think this is poor. E.g. you disconnect from the network and go roaming. When you return to the office, you want to find all documents and mails containing 'squeamish ossifrage'. Why should you have to wait for your PC to do the indexing? And does your indexing process "touch" each file? If it does, it could seriously screw up any attempts to archive all old data - everything would look current as every file was being touched by all PCs' indexing programs.
Surely it's feasible to get a master indexing catalogue built from a number of indexing sources. What I would like to see is an indexer for Exchange that indexes each individual mailbox but returns user-specific queries. So when I dock back at the office, I can immediately search for new documents that have been delivered to the Exchange server while I've been disconnected, and indexed on my behalf. Of course, what hits I get returned are unique to me as only my mailbox index is visible to me - as your mailbox index is unique to you. Meanwhile, common areas, such as shared file servers / public folders / web content etc can have their index shared across both of us.
Nonetheless, do not underestimate the joy of being able to use either of these tools and have an instantaneous method for locating a buried document that you know is somewhere on your PC, yet cannot remember precisely where.
Aegilops
i don't get it. what's up with search being the "holy grail" of computing? kindly explain this to me. is everyone really this disorganized that everyone has to search for their own files now?
if everyone really wants to be able to search their stuff, it might be better to do away with files for documents completely. why not just make a real database (not fs database like winfs or whatever other bullshit they were thinking), where all documents, presentations, spreadsheets, are inputted into a real sql database as xml? maybe allow each application to create their own "database" with their own "table" with their own specific fields. then allow all these to be searchable by whatever search engine can be integrated with whatever desktop interface you may have. let's do away with files completely if people just keep on losing them, and have to search for them.
actually from reading what i just typed, it sounds like how a palm works. each app has their own searchable resource files. i don't really know how that will work with the stuff people type though. and images are another issue. most of the time, i find organizing pictures the toughest. documents are easy to categorize, but pictures, that's really a tough one.
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
Am I the only one who doesn't get the point of this new-fangled "Desktop Search" idea? I mean, I tried installing the Google Desktop Search for awhile, but I never actually used it. In fact, I couldn't even think of a use for it. Unless you're hard drive is completely unorganized, or you're on a multi-user computer, I don't see the point of searching for things you should already know you have.
Nothing disturbs me more than blind loyalism towards some unrealistic and over-idealistic notion of one's nationality.
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.
When Microsoft decides it's time to compete they always have the same MO:
1) Buy a company that is already doing it and doing it fairly well.
2) Rapidly make "improvements" to the software (including whatever adjustments necessary so that it only works well with other Microsoft products) without focusing on security issues.
3) Release it, giving it away for free if necessary.
4) Continue to update and improve it while you drive the competition out of the market.
4) Integrate it into the next version of Windows (again ignoring any potential security issues) to put a final stake in the heart of your competition.
5) Once the competition is gone, move the developers on to something else.
I don't care how good their desktop search product becomes; nobody who uses Windows should ever use it. It'll be crap when it's first released but get better and better. Eventually it will probably be better than the offerings from other companies but have no illusions. If Microsoft is able to gain market dominance, they'll stop working on the product. Of course, by that time it'll be integrated into the OS and there will be a whole host of security vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited by the script kiddies.
We've been through this before with Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, etc.
Give credit where credit is due.
I understand if licensing or patents are involved because then MS would want to own them now instead of geting into trouble later. (Indeed, one of the story links indicate patents are involved: It seems that Lookout already has some patents on desktop search technology. Microsoft's work was independetly developed. They are just protecting their back from patent litigations.)
Also, if MS buys the company then there's less similar competition in the future (the small company already proved it could out-Microsoft Microsoft).
In these cases it wouldn't be about the technology at all.
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
you forgot OS X