Microsoft Monday is set to release an upgrade to its MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search that adds a number of enhancements, including the ability to preview documents on users’ hard drives.
Microsoft Monday released an upgrade to its MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search that adds a number of enhancements, including the ability to preview documents on users’ hard drives.
This upgraded version of the search toolbar, which requires Windows XP or Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 or later versions, features a new preview pane to let users view documents retrieved from their PCs.
Another enhancement is an increased capability to determine which files in a user’s PC the toolbar should index. Microsoft has also created a Web site , where users will find components created by third parties to extend the toolbar’s desktop search functionality. Finally, the upgraded version getting unveiled Monday features new wizard-like setup tools as well as improved performance.
In several months, the toolbar, which also lets users search the Web, will gain tabbed browsing functionality, which will result in individual searches organized as tabs. Another future plan is the creation of a desktop search tool for the workplace; Microsoft plans to have a beta version of this tool by year-end.
One thing the toolbar doesn’t do is index information that users of MSN online services, such as the Hotmail Web mail service, may have stored in Microsoft servers, said Dane Glasgow, product unit manager for MSN Search. Indexing server-based information is something rival Yahoo Inc. has begun to do with its own desktop search product.
The Microsoft toolbar, which makes its desktop search functionality available from Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and Outlook, can index and retrieve the metadata of over 200 different types of files, as well as the full text of some file types. At this point, the only e-mail files it indexes are those in Outlook 2000 or later versions and Outlook Express 6.0 or later versions.
The Microsoft toolbar, which requires Internet Explorer 5.01 or later versions, became made available on Monday for free download .
The product works well, delivers solid search results and has a good user interface, said Allen Weiner, a Gartner analyst.
Consumers, however, are bound to be feeling quite overwhelmed with all the desktop search options that have become available in the past eight months or so from Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and Blinkx, Weiner said.
Trying out a desktop search tool is more taxing than testing online services, because it requires a software download and installation and time to learn how to use it, as well as the indexing of the user’s hard drive, Weiner said.
Moreover, not all desktop search tools can co-exist peacefully, so testing one could interfere with the operation of another one, Weiner said. “It’s not a market consumers will fiddle around with. People will select one and live with it,” he said.
The stakes are high for desktop search vendors, because users’ desktop search preference will dictate their Web search preference as well, Weiner said.
In the meantime, desktop search vendors face another challenge: getting users to grasp their tools’ value, something that will be easier in the future when hard drives house significantly more multimedia content than they do now, Weiner said.
“When you have 3,000 digital songs from five music services and video content from four different TV services, then desktop search tools become compelling,” Weiner said.
Another analyst took issue with the toolbar’s lack of support for the Mozilla Foundation’s increasingly popular Firefox browser.
Although Firefox’s share of the overall browser market is still small — 6.8% according to WebSideStory — its use is wider among tech-savvy users, said Guy Creese, an analyst with Ballardvale Research, an IT analysis and consulting company in Andover, Mass., that specializes in Web site optimization.
“It’s a big mistake to ignore Firefox users. They are early adopters and thus keen on trying out new stuff, such as desktop search tools,” Creese said, adding that about 25% of visitors to Ballardvale’s Web site use Firefox.
