The web is a-buzz with expectation as we make our final march towards Vista Beta2. There are many rumours about the exact timing, the exact date. More important than “when?”, however, is “what?”. Quite apart from the ship date of Vista Beta2, and eventually of Vista & Longhorn Server, what is its contents? WinHec06 is beginning tomorrow, and its focus is Vista & Longhorn Server. What is the focus on?

Since Beta1 in December of 2005, more and more people in Microsoft have been self-hosting Vista as a daily work machine, as a laptop OS, as a home computer. The February CTP improved on Beta1, and increased the ranks of self-hosters. Since February, we also have many customers who are beta testing both Vista as a client and deploying Longhorn as a server.

Over this time period, I tried to self-host myself, but until last week, I failed. There were some mundane reasons for this failure: I did not have enough time to transfer all my apps and data to a new computer. The Windows Easy Transfer wizard was not working that well yet, and even if it worked perfectly, I felt uneasy letting it handle the weird partition structure I maintained on my XP desktop. For a while I was dogfooding Office 2007, and I felt one dogfood at a time was more than enough.

But the most important reason was Search.

I did not realize how much I came to depend on Windows Desktop Search. Since lookout I have stopped filing into folders—I flattened my filing folders to a single archive folder. Since Yahoo's X1 and Google’s desktop search, I stopped deleting my e-mails—I archive everything that may remotely be necessary one day. And since MSN’s desktop search, and later with Windows Desktop search, I nearly stopped using the Windows Explorer and Outlook’s folder views—I use the search view exclusively. At each step in that progression of search tools, I came to depend on another feature that became mission-critical for my day-to-day work. So much so that now, I have literally gigabytes of email, documents, cached files from our team spec library, documents I collected from the web, source code snippets, blogs, all sitting on my computer.

I jumped on the Vista self-host bandwagon soon after Beta1, but I jumped right off, because search did not work for me. In Beta1 Vista Search fell short:

  • Indexing email: Played reasonably well with Outlook 2003, but severely conflicted with Outlook 2007’s indexer. This was not a deal-breaker though—I could live with slow results, and did not expect to dogfood two Beta-1 products at once.
  • Reliability & uptime: As expected from a Beta 1 product, memory use, stability, and performance was dismal. But it was improving.
  • Scope & Comprehensiveness: I had no idea and no control over what was being indexed or searched. This was a deal breaker: While “finding” is important, not-finding is almost as important: If I search for a tag that I know should hit that market research I downloaded last year, and I don’t get a hit on my desktop, that is still a very valuable result: It tells me a clear “No”, and stops me from wasting my time. Assured that I really searched everything I had, I can now search for it somewhere else, e.g. by going to the Internet, or to the CorpNet library. But if my index is not comprehensive or if the search scope is not clear, then I do not get that clear “no”.
  • Tag search: “From:samim to:steve date:yesterday” simply did not work. This was a deal breaker, too. I had no way to find many things which I remember only by those tags.

Now, with Vista Beta2, I find that all of these are fixed:

  • The indexer in Outlook 2007 Beta 2 works perfectly with the one in Vista Beta 2. I have my 200K+ emails all indexed and can find an email I sent 4 years ago, using either the Outlook interface or the Vista interface. Wow!
  • Tag search is back: I can now enter the tags right into the search box. This is immensely useful and so intuitive. I personally have no use for the search builder UI, and I am glad it is tucked out of the way in the default view.
  • Reliability: I have been using a Beta-2 build on my work PC for a full week now, and I have never seen the search fail, or take more than 3 seconds to return results. That does not mean it does not crash: A couple times I saw a pop-up saying “SearchIndexer.exe stopped functioning…” But, it restarts even after a crash.
  • Scope: One gripe I had from Beta1 was that the default scope of the search was the current window. This made no sense to me: If what I was looking for was in the current folder, I would not be searching for it, right? Now with Beta 2, searching over everything is a lot easier. I think this still needs to improve, but now it works much better.
  • Comprehensiveness: The UI to control what is indexed, while still a bit cumbersome, makes better sense now. As a PM, I would agree that this UI is useful only for a very small minority of tech-savvy users. But I am one of them, and I am happy to have it.

At the end I can say this: Vista Search is going to improve your life and Beta2 is here to prove it. Even if you set your UI Theme to Windows Classic and never see a single shred of AeroGlass, you will get enough from search alone to make the wait worthwhile.