Windows Desktop Search 3 Released — Does it Work?
Posted on October 26, 2006
15 Comments
It’s been a long time since I last tried out assorted desktop search tools. Not sure I’ve looked at any this year as I’ve been reasonably content with the the Outlook plugin “Lookout.” Earlier today I saw that Microsoft had released Windows Desktop Search v3 and decided it was time to dip a toe back in this realm.
The install is quite painless. No questions to answer, it just does its thing — and doesn’t even need a reboot.
After the install I first noticed a reasonably discrete toolbar down by the windows tray for search. There’s also an obligatory task tray item too, of course. Right clicking the task tray item brings up a context menu:
Clicking the magnifying glass by the search field launches a more full-featured search app. Seems intuitive enough to use.
The indexer is polite and dramatically slows down (stops?) when the computer is being used. I took pity on it and told it to Index Now and I can say it’s zippy.
However…
Here’s the default options screen (note the surprising lack of selected areas to index):
It has no interest in indexing my Outlook email. In fact, perhaps I’m missing the boat here, but by default it wants to search my Documents and Setting folder (which would be “My Documents” and “Desktop” for the most part) and Outlook Express. I’ve never used Outlook Express on this machine. I can’t seem to find an option to point it at my Outlook 2k3 installation. Do you suppose this thing only works with Office 2007? Heck, I read on the site:
The search engine in Windows Desktop Search 3.0 is a Windows service that is also used by applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007 to index application content and deliver instant results when searching within that application.
I guess I didn’t interpret that to mean, don’t bother unless using those apps. Mmph. Suddenly I’m not so interested in a desktop search product today.
Am I missing something obvious?
Tags: beta, desktop-search, microsoft, search
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15 Responses to “Windows Desktop Search 3 Released — Does it Work?”
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Yes, the default search options seem sparse. However, once Outlook (2003 in my case) was launched Desktop Search automatically detected it and added it to the search list.
Iceberg
Hi Iceberg, I had Outlook 2k3 running when I did the install. This evening I reckon I’ll reboot and see if it gets noticed when I fire it up. Thanks for the idea!
Rebooting worked. It’s now indexing Outlook 2k3. Thanks!
FYI, once you install the new search tool it looks like you can’t go back to Lookout if you don’t like it.
Does anyone else have the problem that whenever you move a folder from one place to another, it permanently loses track of them and their contents never appear in search results again? I’ve waited until it says there are no more items left to scan, so the index is up to date (supposedly). This seems a pretty fundamental for a search programme!
Hi Martin. Have to confess I personally didn’t leave it installed long enough to run into that problem. Perhaps someone else did though.
Charlie - I didn’t have that issue. But I did completely uninstall it before trying Lookout again, for what that’s worth.
I just installed WDS on a new computer. Seems to work fairly well so far. However, I liked Lookout b/c it was located directly in outlook. it seems the microsoft acquired lookout and now you can no longer download the lookout outlook plugin. Does anyone know if you can add a WDS search bar into outlook? thanks.
I’ve installed in on my work PC, and noticed it doesn’t allow indexing of network drives. There is a MS update for this.
Once done, I realised it opens desktop search when trying to search non indexed folders (by right clicking on that folder -> search), so then I have to click desktop companion.
So, now i’ve selected the folder I want to be indexed and clicked index now (the folder is massive). That took 2 days to index (with pausing in the day), leaving my pc on overnight (wtf).
It now has completed and when I right click on that folder it still says not indexed.
To be honest i’m quite peed with it, the normal search was good enough for me in the first place but as this is a new PC, i’d thought I try it out.
What would be good is to stop this program running when I right click -> search a folder. Part of my job is having to move several files from one folder to another (to stop people using them until they are updated). I can’t scroll to the file as i’m talking a folder with tens of thousands of files.
Jordan - that would be rather handy. I don’t recall seeing the option, but I just didn’t stick with it long enough to be sure.
Jason - Yikes!
Ok, this program is now uninstalled. Why:
It constantly is indexing (80% of the time), due to the amount of information I search for (which is being constantly changed); hence using my processor nearly all the time (although it does reduce indexing when you work).
You can’t right click on a folder and search, for some reason it always finds nothing. But if you click on the magnifying glass it does find those files but in all directories.
The results include all files in a folder that is named what I am searching for (i.e. I search for “123″, and it will result in showing all files in a folder with a partial name of “123″).
The only things I miss:
Searching emails, and it highlights words in yellow. A very good feature.
Searching the contents of files, and gives you a preview (I never used this before so don’t miss it).
A big disappointment for me.
did LOOKOUT stop LOOKING?
>> did LOOKOUT stop LOOKING?
I’m not sure what you mean?
The only way that I know of to get a search bar inside Outlook is to install the Live Toolbar for IE. This integrates with WDS and has an optional Outlook toolbar. Works quite nicely.
I looked at WDS as a Lookout replacement. The main thing I like about it is that it auto-previews emails (and presumably documents, but I never search for those). However you can’t index offline PST files, unless you trick it by creating extra Outlook profiles, and it slows my laptop down considerably (a 1.8GHz Pentium M with 1GB RAM). I think I’ll be going back to Lookout for now.
Hey John,
9 months later
I installed the latest version of this a few months ago when I got back into the OneNote 2k7 scene.
I’m actually quite pleased with it, this time around. Works great with my Outlook and OneNote stuff and doesn’t seem to clobber my (work) machine’s 3.something or other AMD processor.
I’ll agree that It would be nice to have the search bar in Outlook, but generally I’ve adapted to having it down there on the taskbar.
I’m not sure I’ve run into the “offline PST” issue. It has indexed my local archives, for what that’s worth.
Thanks for the reply, Chris. WDS runs fine on my home PC, but my work laptop is somewhat old and creaky.
I know this was an old post, but it was a help for me, and I wanted to answer some of the questions rasied about the toolbar.
By “offline PSTs”, I mean PSTs that aren’t loaded into Outlook. For work I have a PST per year, and there’s a *lot* of mail in them, so I don’t keep them open all the time. Lookout indexes them anyway, once it knows about them, and you can double-click to directly open mails from the PST, even though it’s not currently open in Outlook.
With WDS, you have to create a dummy Outlook profile, load the PSTs, open them and let WDS index them. Then close Outlook and reopen it in your normal profile and the indexed “offline” PSTs are still searchable in WDS. You can’t double-click on the mail item to open it, as Outlook doesn’t have it loaded, but can you read them in the WDS preview pane.
I hope that makes sense! I’m just getting to grips with Vista and OL2007 on my home PC, and between built-in WDS and the improved Outlook search, I have high hopes I won’t need Lookout any more.