Windows
Desktop Search
A
Review by Kunal Kundaje
The MSN Search team at
Microsoft recently released a final build of the MSN Toolbar Suite with MSN
Desktop Search, now known as MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search.
This review covers the desktop search aspect of the application suite.
Installation:
The final build features a new
installer with a few more options so that you can configure the application the
way you want it. One particularly nice addition to the installer is the option
to enable or disable the toolbars for Internet Explorer and Outlook. Many users
(including myself) are interested only in the desktop search aspect of the
application and don’t need two additional toolbars floating around.
Once installation is complete,
a first-time configuration wizard pops up that allows the user to specify which
folders should be indexed. By default, only the My Documents folder and emails
are indexed. Many users don’t check the options and wonder why their files
(stored in other locations) don’t show up in search results even after indexing
is complete. Allowing them to specify what to index right after installation is
a good move.
First Impressions – UI changes:
Probably the first thing most
users will notice right after installation is the refreshed UI. The new deskbar
looks much more polished and takes up less taskbar space than the one in the
beta builds. It strongly resembles the MSN Search (on the web) UI with the
simple white input box and the green Go/Search button (the latter can be
removed through the Options dialog. No more registry hacking!). The “butterfly”
button that existed in beta builds has now been moved into the fly-out panel
that displays results as you type, presumably to save space on the taskbar. The
fly-out panel itself also looks somewhat cleaner. Finally, the little icon in
the notification area has also changed and is now simply a magnifying glass
without the butterfly.
The deskbar from the beta builds (left) and final version
(right)
The full search window that
comes up when you double click the magnifying glass or search for something
also sports a new, more MSN Search like look with blue gradients, and a new
Windows Desktop Search product logo. There’s also a Preview Pane that displays
quick previews of documents, text files, emails, pictures, presentations etc. I
will be covering that in greater details later in this review.
All-in-all, the new UI is
welcome change and incorporates lots of feedback that users, including myself,
submitted during the beta phase of the program.
Initial Indexing – a pleasant surprise:
One of the first things that
happen immediately after installation is the initial indexing process. All the
files in the folders that the user specifies need to be indexed before they can
appear in the search results. This was a painfully slow process in the first
public build that we had a chance to play with. However, the team has been
constantly working to speed up this process, and it has been clearly noticeable
along the way. The beta refresh build was already faster at indexing than the
first build. The final release is significantly faster than the beta refresh as
well. I’m currently using it on a two-year old Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop with a
2.4GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of DDR RAM and a 30GB 4,200rpm hard drive. Indexing
about 8 to 9 GB of mixed data, including content-rich Word documents, PDF
files, C++ source code, pictures, music etc. took between 10 and 15 minutes on
my system. Pretty impressive! One of the key factors that affect indexing time
is the speed of the hard drive, since it’s a rather disk-intensive process.
Desktop drives that spin at 7,200rpm and even 10,000rpm these days should be
able to get through the process much faster.
More on Indexing – IFilters and the new options:
Windows Desktop Search indexes
lots of different, commonly-used file types by default. However, users need to
install IFilters for certain file-types like PDFs, ZIP archives etc. IFilters are
add-ins for the indexer that enable it to index new file-types that it normally
wouldn’t recognize. This is a common standard that has been used since the days
of Windows 2000. IFilters are used to extend the functionality of the Indexing
Service built into Windows as well. You can find a list of downloadable
IFilters on the add-ins page and the Channel9 Wiki. Note that with the final
build, it is not necessary to rebuild
your index after you install new IFilters.
Links:
·
http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.DesktopSearchIFilters
Now, indexing is not a
one-time process. In order to keep your search results always up-to-date, the
indexer has to collect information about files and emails that are created, modified
or deleted all the time. Windows Desktop Search receives notifications from the
system everytime such changes occur. However, by default, it waits for the
system to remain idle for a few seconds before it actually goes ahead and
indexes a file. The advantage of this approach is that system performance is
not noticeably affected. The downside is that the index is not updated in real-time.
One of the most welcome
features in this final release is the option to Prioritize Indexing. Enabling
this option allows the indexer to run at a higher priority than it normally
would (
Some other new options related
to the indexer that are new (or were hidden away as registry hacks in the beta
builds) include the ability to turn off indexing when a portable machine is
running on battery power, the ability to specify where the index is stored, and
the ability to specify which file-types should and should not be indexed. These
options give power-users much more control over the indexer. Another welcome
addition is the ability to specify which folders in Outlook and Outlook Express
should be indexed. This was one of those most-wanted features during the beta
phase.
Update (07/10): An add-on protocol handler, now
available as a free download from Citeknet, gives Windows
Desktop Search the ability to index and search the contents of Thunderbird, Mozilla/Netscape Mail and Eudora mailboxes. Download here.
The Deskbar – A Swiss-Army Knife:
By
default, the deskbar is placed at the end of the taskbar right next to the
notification area. This is the most
accessible area since the taskbar is almost always visible. However, on smaller
laptop screens, this can waste valuable taskbar space. I personally prefer to
drag the deskbar out onto the desktop (the taskbar needs to be “unlocked”
first). This makes it a floating toolbar (see image) that can be accessed at
any time using the customizable shortcut key combination, which is Ctrl+Alt+M
by default.
If you’ve used the deskbar
before or if you’ve read my review of the beta builds, you’ll know that it’s
extremely versatile and powerful. The primary function of the deskbar is
searching, so let’s look at that first.
Searching:
To
begin searching, you simply switch focus to the deskbar, either by clicking in
the textbox or using the shortcut keystroke, and begin typing. The system
begins searching through the index while you type and results are refined as
you enter each new character of the search query. This means that, in most
cases, you don’t need to type an entire word or filename to find what you’re
looking for. The results appear in the fly-out search results panel even before
you finish. The results are organized by type, just like Windows Explorer’s
“Show in Groups” feature with “Arrange by Type” enabled.
There is also an advanced
query syntax (look under the Help option) that allows users to fine-tune search
results. For example, if you’re searching for all emails from Adam that
contained some information about ACM funding, you could just type “from:Adam
ACM funding” into the deskbar to find what you’re looking for. The advanced
query syntax is pretty exhaustive and allows users to specify a variety of
attributes.
Once the deskbar has found
what you’re looking for, you can open it up directly through the fly-out
results pane using your keyboard or mouse. Right-clicking a search result
presents the user with the context-menu similar to the ones that are presented
when a file is right-clicked anywhere else in the system. This can be handy if
you want to copy or delete a file, or perform file-type specific actions like
extracting a ZIP/RAR archive. Hitting Enter after typing a search query into
the deskbar opens up the full results window which we will look at a little
later.
In short, search works exactly
like you would expect it to. However, there is one unfortunate bug/oversight in
this latest release that has been brought to the MSN team’s notice already. If
a filename contains underscore characters, the file does not appear in the
search results if the user searches for anything following the underscore
character. For example, searching for “presentation” will not display the file
“Class_presentation.ppt.” This can be a problem for users who use underscores
in place of spaces to separate words in filenames. The team plans to fix this
in a future release.
Aliasing and Application Launching – the Run dialog on steroids:
I mentioned that the primary
function of the deskbar is searching, but that’s not the only thing it can do. One
of the unique features of Windows Desktop Search that none of the other desktop
search apps have is the concept of aliasing. This is a killer feature for
power-users.
Aliases are shortcuts that can
be used to perform more complex queries and even launch applications! That’s
right – if you’re a keyboard person like I am, you can throw away the Quick
Launch toolbar and all your icons on the desktop. Heck, you probably won’t even
use the Start Menu anymore once you get the hang of this.
You can launch common
applications by prefixing their names with the ‘=’ character. For example,
=iexplore opens up Internet Explorer, =firefox opens up Firefox, and so on. But
that’s too much work, right? This feature can be combined with aliases to
create short keywords to launch all your frequently-used applications. Defining
an alias is a one-time process, and you do it by typing something like this
into the deskbar and hitting Enter:
@fx,=firefox
@fz,="C:\Program Files\Filezilla\filezilla.exe"
The initial @ tells the
deskbar that you’re defining an alias. You then give it a name (like fx or fz),
followed by a comma, the ‘=’ character and the name or location of the
application you want to launch.
Once you’ve set up aliases for
all your apps, they’re saved until you change or delete them. You can then
launch Firefox by simply typing fx and hitting Enter. Once you get the hang of
it, using the mouse to point-and-click on icons will just seem too slow and
cumbersome. Of course, this is assuming you’re quick at the keyboard. :)
But that’s not all you can do!
You can also set up aliases for custom web searches. Do you use Google Maps
often? How about Dictionary.com? Create aliases for them as follows:
@map,http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$w
@dict,http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=$w
The $w gets replaced by the
first argument you type after the alias keyword. For example, typing “dict
omniscient” will open up your default browser and search Dictionary.com for the
word omniscient. Fast and convenient!
Full Search Results View:
So the results displayed in
the deskbar fly-out pane aren’t enough. You want to see more detailed
information about each result. Not a problem. As mentioned earlier, just hit
Enter after typing your search query and a window opens up with detailed search
results.
It’s important to note that
this window uses a shell namespace extension and that it is not an Internet
Explorer window. The fact that Google Desktop Search displays search results in
a browser window misled many users into thinking this does too. However, if you
think about it, displaying search results in browser window is not very prudent
for a desktop search app. It does not allow the kind of rich interaction that’s
possible when using a shell namespace extension. For example, with Windows
Desktop Search, you can right-click search results and work with the same
familiar context-menu that you use everywhere else in the system. You can drag
and drop search results into other folders and applications. None of this is
possible if the results are displayed in a browser window.
Search results displayed in detail
Moving on, the full search
results window displays additional information about your results, including
thumbnails of images and presentations, excerpts of documents, text files, PDF
files, source code, emails and other indexed files, as well as other metadata
like the date the file was modified, the author, the file size etc. The user
can also filter out results of only a particular type. The context menu for
email messages includes a special option called “Show Conversation” that
displays all messages in the same conversation thread. While this feature has
existed since the first beta, I’m mentioning it here for those users who didn’t
use those builds, and also because I think it’s a rather handy feature that
I’ve used on multiple occasions.
New in this final build is the
preview pane, which was another hot request during the beta period. The preview
pane, as the name suggests, gives you a quick preview of the contents of indexed
files like documents, text files, emails etc. as well as images and music. Users
can specify what file-types are previewed in the pane through the Options
dialog. One nice feature of the preview pane is that it displays similar files
in the same folder as well. For example, if you click on a result that’s an
image, it shows you a thumbnail of the image in the preview pane, along with
smaller thumbnails of other images in the same folder. Same goes for music as
well.
Preview pane displaying the contents
of an email message
Preview pane displaying music
metadata and album art, along with a track listing of other songs in the same
folder.
Notice how similar the UI is to the
MSN Music Store.
However, there are a few
quirks here. Displaying previews of Office-related files like Word documents,
Powerpoint presentations etc. is a little glitchy and delayed the first time. I
hope these issues will be ironed out in future releases. I also wish songs
would play without opening an instance of a media player when the little play
button next to them is clicked, but that goes on the wish-list rather than
being a bug report. Other than that, the preview pane is definitely a great
addition to the app and a time-saver that most users will appreciate.
Bookmarked Searches:
Now you’re familiar with the
numerous capabilities of the versatile deskbar and how the whole search process
works. So do you find yourself doing repeated searches for the same items
throughout the day? That’s where bookmarked searches come in. This feature
works almost exactly like the Favorites/Bookmarks feature in your web browser.
Perform a search and bookmark the results. Next time you open the bookmark
(which can be accessed through the Favorites menu item in Windows Explorer or
IE), the results will automatically be populated with any new results that
match the search query that was bookmarked. In effect, this is almost like the
smart Search Folder feature that has existed in Outlook 2003 for a quite a while,
but across the whole filesystem.
Concluding Thoughts:
I think the MSN team has been
doing a fantastic job during the past few months. Community involvement has
been great, and users have been submitting wish-lists and bug reports on the
Channel9 wiki and the official MSN Search blog on MSDN. It’s wonderful to see
how well the team has been responding to feedback from users during the entire
beta program. Many features that I was hoping to see have been incorporated
into this final build, and I’m confident that any quirks present in this build
will be fixed in future releases.
Of course, there’s always room
for improvement. One feature that would make Windows Desktop Search a real
killer product is the ability to integrate deskbar-like functionality easily into third-party applications.
Imagine having instant-search functionality in all of your applications using
the same familiar interface. Providing .NET API’s for third-party software
developers would make this possible. The Google Desktop Search SDK available
today offers similar functionality, but it suffers from the same problem I
mentioned earlier – the user interface does not allow Explorer-like interaction
such as context-menus and drag-and-drop which, in my opinion, is essential when
working with files and folders. I strongly urge the MSN team to look into something
like this for future releases. Extensibility is always a good thing.
To conclude, I think Windows
Desktop Search is a top notch product that will satisfy the needs and wants of
most users until the release of Longhorn, which promises to deliver similar but
more advanced search, data organization and visualization functionality. A big
thank you to everyone on the MSN Search team responsible for this product for all
the work they’ve put into it, and looking forward to seeing what the future of
desktop search holds!
Update (07/10): A few days ago, the desktop
search team at MSN announced the availability of a search API for ISV’s! There
are a large number of apps that can greatly benefit from indexed search, and the new API's from MSN make the task quite a bit
simpler. For more details on this, including a sample application with source
code (in C#, that too!) check out the announcement
on the MSN Search blog.
This is fantastic!
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© 2005 Kunal
Kundaje. All Rights Reserved.