How to create your own search engine in Windows 7

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

One of the rarely talked about new features in Windows 7 is federated search. This not only allows you to search for files on SharePoint servers or the company intranet as if they were stored locally on your PC, it also lets you search public websites from within Windows Explorer.

Right now you’re probably asking why on Earth you’d want to search websites in Explorer when you’ve got a perfectly good web browser and Google for such purposes? Well, there are several advantages. First, Windows Explorer starts searching websites as you type, just like it does with locally-stored files, meaning the page you’re looking for often crops up before you’ve even finished typing the search terms. It’s blisteringly fast too – often quicker than the website’s own search engine.

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