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News Stories Confuse Me: Microsoft Won't Bundle Desktop Search with Windows

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I noticed an eWeek article this morning titled Microsoft Won't Bundle Desktop Search with Windows which has had me scratching my head all morning. The article contains the following excerpts

Microsoft Corp. has no immediate plans to integrate desktop search into its operating system, a company executive said at a conference here this weekend.
...
Indeed, while including desktop search in Windows might seem like a logical step to many, "there's no immediate plan to do that as far as I know," Kroese said. "That would have to be a Bill G. [Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates] and the lawyers' decision."

I thought Windows already had desktop search. In fact, Jon Udell of  Infoworld recently provided a screencast in his blog post Where was desktop search when we needed it? which shows off the capabilities of the built-in Windows desktop search which seems almost on par with the recent offerings from MSN, Google and the like.

Now I'm left wondering what the EWeek article means. Does it mean there aren't any plans to replace the annoying animated dog  with the MSN butterfly? That Microsoft has access to a time machine and will go back and rip out desktop search from the operating system including the annoying animated dog? Or is there some other obvious conclusion that can be drawn from the facts and the article that I have failed to grasp?

The technology press really disappoints me sometimes.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2005
    Technology press is indeed disappointing. All the times they were covering Google's "groundbreaking" desktop search program, Windows's Indexing Service was never mentioned. (Of course, it wasn't easy to use either...)
  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2005
    I assume you are being facetious, but your point is still lost on me. If Microsoft already had a desktop search why would MSN make one?

  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2005
    I suspect it is because few people knew about or used the built-in Windows desktop search because the indexer utilized too much CPU power leading people to shut it off and all the powerful features were only accessible via arcane commands.

    Desktop search is just a fancy new buzzword for the file search functionality that every popular operating system I am aware of already has. The fact that Google, MSN and Yahoo are hyping what is basic operating system functionality notwhitstanding.
  • Anonymous
    January 31, 2005
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2005
    "But it's basic functionality Windows doesn't have."

    Yes it does, you (and many other people) just never realized it. Read the article Dare linked to, it has a short filmg demoing Indexing Service.

    http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/01/25.html#a1157
  • Anonymous
    February 01, 2005
    domovoi: see my specific comments. Especially regarding preview, which Indexing Search doesn't have at all. Until it does, even FINDSTR is preferable since you can see what phrase matches your search.

    Also you might want to do some reading about how Google works. They've got about 100,000 servers storing multiple copies of the whole text of their crawled web, in memory. Why? They don't need that for searching: all they need for that is an index. The reason they need all that power is so that they can show a preview: that little extract of matching text.

    The preview is an essential part of searching: in practice you almost always get more than a couple of matching results, and opening up each document separately to see if it's the one you want greatly increases the total time of the task.

    It may have been meant sarcastically, but MSN search now has nice preview functionality: maybe you SHOULD get the MSN boys to rewrite Windows search...