MSN toobar Suite Beta

February 1, 2005 on 7:05 am | In General |

Following on Beagle’s discovery yesterday, I wanted to see what there was out there for the Windows crowd. Something that would be more accessible than Beagle to the average Joe.

My search drove me to “Google Desktop Search”:http://desktop.google.com first. I wanted to download and test it, given the hype that it received a few weeks back, then I realised that GDS is mostly a web application, with a backend indexing application running in the system tray. Which did not sound too solid to me.

I then came across the “MSN toolbar Suite Beta”:http://beta.toolbar.msn.com/. According to the feature list, it seeemed to integrate well with Windows and to be a proper desktop application. I promptly downloaded and installed it on my system. Apart from a glitch when the application was launched; for some reason, every single file gets scanned by the anti-virus software as they are open, which made the initial indexing very slow. Luckily, MSN Desktop Search, the search component of the suite, is clever enough to pause or slow down indexing according to the computer’s performance. Once indexing resumed, it was very fast. The search was also instantaneous, listing matching results _ala_ Spotlight, with different filtering options.

The appearance of so many new-wave desktop search tools is interesting. I was just commenting yesterday about how this changes the way we interact with information. Presumably, developers realised the need for this type of tools when they found out how Google was gaining in popularity. In any case, these are very useful for _personal data-mining_ on your computer. For instance, during my tests yesterday, I typed a keyword that returned results for documents and e-mail that I never knew existed.

Desktop search tools could very well revive the industry’s interest in free-form database and AI-driven search tools.

Technorati Tags: MSN, desktop, search, tools

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