Product Reviews

Google's Desktop Search (reviewed in What's New, Shopper February 2005) has attracted a lot of attention recently, and now Microsoft is getting in on the act. It's tempting to dismiss Microsoft's new search tools as merely a copycat effort. However, it turns out that Microsoft has done a good job, and the new features are a distinct improvement over the existing search tools available in Windows.

Like Google's Desktop Search, the MSN Toolbar is at the beta stage of development and available as a free download. After a quick installation, the MSN Toolbar is easy to access - more so than Google's Desktop Search, which you access from an icon in the System Tray or by launching a web browser. Instead, the MSN Toolbar Suite puts a new search bar on the Windows taskbar, which is always visible. To use it you simply type what you're looking for, whether it's a filename, some text from a document or a file type such as .jpg.

Microsoft has implemented its autocomplete technology, so a list of relevant

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files appears above the Deskbar as soon as you start typing. We tried to locate a file called Glacier.jpg, and the moment we typed the letter G the Deskbar showed us a list of files beginning with that letter. As we typed the rest of the filename the Deskbar narrowed the search to isolate the file we were looking for. The results on a 2.5GHz Pentium 4 PC were pretty much instantaneous and certainly faster than using the standard search feature in the Windows Start Menu.

If you can't find what you're looking for among the files on your own PC, you can press the Web Search button at the bottom of the file list to look on the web instead. For more thorough web searches a new MSN toolbar also appears in Internet Explorer. This contains a text box into which you can type the words you're looking for, so you don't have to go to a specific website to begin your search.

Microsoft has also come up with an interesting option called the Viewer. When you go to a web page that the search tools have found for you, the Viewer can display a miniature preview of that page and highlight the words you used in your search. This allows you to home in quickly on the information you want. A similar toolbar also appears in Windows Explorer and Outlook, allowing you to search from within those programs too, perhaps to look for an old email, or just browse the contents of your hard disk.

MSN's Toolbar Suite has more features than Google's and is better integrated with Windows. However, its reliance on Internet Explorer makes Google's Desktop Search the best choice for users of other browsers.