MSN has rolled out its own version of desktop search. I can’t say I was immediately impressed as the indexing of my content literally took days and it seemed to slow my computer down at times while indexing paused.
I have not had much chance to use MSN desktop search to compare with Google’s however this morning I did give it a test run, looking for an old image that I was not sure if I still have on my hard drive. I did happen to remember the image name so I ran a search using both MSN and Google desktops.
Google produced one .bmp file. That was PART of the image I wanted, the master file in which I used to create a different file. I switched over to MSN, which also found the .bmp file, but it also found the .psd file, the photoshop document that had all my editing and alterations to the original image. THAT is the image I wanted.
Thank you MSN.
MSN also offers some advanced searching features allowing you to separate documents, email, music, pictures, and video… and a drop down of subsets of each of those. You can even ask it to search Outlook only. Quite nice. Google offers a few choices, but its not nearly as robust.
The one element that Google offers that MSN lacks is cached copies. This has been helpful when I’ve saved changes to web sites and was not able to go back and correct, or when I need to revert back to an old version of any other document. Google has also been handy at giving me caches of documents I’ve deleted so I could restore them.
Until I find everything I want in a single desktop search tool, I’m happy to have both MSN and Google desktop installed. Both containing “must have” features the other lacks.