MSN Desktop Search continues to impress people. Just a couple of days back, Ars Technica reviewers rated MSN Desktop Search as their personal favorite. And now MSN seems to have found another fan - The Forbes Magazine.
Microsoft's MSN desktop search beats its competitors hands down, primarily because of a superior user interface that integrates better with other Windows programs. Consent decree or no, Microsoft has once again managed to leverage its operating system dominance to its advantage.The Forbes also reviewed desktop search tools from Yahoo! and Google. All of the desktop programs did a very nice job of digging their way through the morass. The difference came mainly in the design of the programs, and how intuitive they were. And again, the other popular alternatives like Blinkx and Copernic were not reviewed in this report.
MSN, by contrast, was almost shockingly intuitive for a Windows user. The results were shown in a list format, and e-mails could be sorted by sender, subject and date, just as in Outlook. It was very easy, via tabs on the desktop search, to switch between searches of documents and searches of e-mails. Like the other programs, it took the MSN program an afternoon to create an index of all the e-mail and files on my hard drive. But once the index had been created, it updated automatically in the background and searches took mere seconds.