The new MSN Desktop Search tool represents the combined efforts of several different search teams within Microsoft, some of which have shown their tools externally (e.g. MSR’s Stuff I’ve Seen), and all of which have had their own internal beta programs. I’ve played with a couple of them over the past year, but to be honest they suffered from a lack of good UI, and search is such a short-lived task that a bad interface can mean you’ll never bother using it. Thankfully, not only did all the different search teams sit down together for long enough to ship something, but they found some UI designers too

So, here are some thoughts after dogfooding MSN Desktop Search for the past couple of months:

  • My favorite “power-user” feature so far is prefixing words with = to turn them into commands, which are then stored in history for one-click recall. This has completely replaced Start->Run for me.
  • By default it’ll put search-boxes everywhere - in your taskbar, in Outlook, and in Internet Explorer. Choice is good, but since I’m a bear of very little brain I just stick to the taskbar version. Whatever I’m working on, I know that I’ll always have the taskbar visible, and Ctrl-Alt-M will put my cursor into the search box ready to start typing. Of course, I very rarely even see the Internet Explorer version, since I almost exclusively use Maxthon (aka MyIE2), for its tabbed browsing capabilities…
  • If you’ve got a loud disk or a variable-speed fan, you’ll have to reset your expectations of judging what your machine is doing by the sound it’s making. With my laptop, I’ve set things up so that if I’m not actively crunching something, both the fan and the disk are idle. But MSN Desktop Search considers (rightly!) that your idle time is the perfect time to make sure that your disk is indexed — which can lead to the unnerving experience of the disk suddenly spinning up 15 seconds after you stop using the machine. If this freaks you out too much, Snooze Indexing is your friend.
  • MSN have put a lot of thought into the security and privacy aspects of desktop search. I know that there are user scenarios that they just cut completely for the beta, because these same scenarios could conceivably be used in certain corner cases to leak information that might potentially be private. It’s great to see us being really pro-active about this stuff.
  • It’s a beta, so there are bugs! I found one that I think is still in the public beta, but will be fixed in a future release (if you want to repro it: the wordwheel window won’t always appear if you have multiple vertical desktops and a vertical taskbar).
  • The good news about bugs is that the desktop search team have been incredibly responsive to internal feedback— they’ll be blogging on the msnsearch weblog, so head over there (or just post a trackback) if you’ve got external feedback! You can also watch videos of the Redmond team and the Silicon Valley team over on Channel 9, both showing off demos of desktop search.
  • Did you notice how Scoble “subtly” set up the blogosphere for this release over the past few days? There was the hints of things to come this week, the no-comment reporting of leaks, the reviewer’s guide, and even pointers to search blogs to watch (of which SearchEngineWatch seems to be first with feedback). That’s our Robert, about as subtle as a 2x4 upside the head

Of course, now that the damn thing’s gone public I feel compelled to master all of its other power-user features as well, just to “keep up”. Sigh, the life of a dogfooder…