MSN Desktop Search - Is there anything Google can do that MSN can't copy?
Tuesday, December 14 2004
I mean, come on. When is MSN Suggest coming out? Six months or so?
Maybe I am being harsh, but Scoble got me excited yesterday...
"Remember last Sunday when I said I had seen something that left me speechless? Well, in the videos I filmed (and I filmed more than 1.5 hours worth with nearly the entire team working on the thing that's being shipped into beta on Monday) I am heard saying "that's wicked."
-http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2004/12/12.html#a8865
A desktop search left you speechless? Maybe a WinFS desktop search would leave me speechless, but something that does pretty much what Google does and only works in IE does not leave me speechless. The GUI is pretty nice, and it has some cool filtering stuff... but it is only really useful if I want to leave that search box on my taskbar or if I switch back to using IE... neither of which I am going to do anytime soon.
What am I missing?
I would love to see MSN do some cool interesting innovative stuff... I want to see Google trying to copy MSN.. then I will be impressed and speechless.
-James
Comments
- #1 Akibahara on 12.13.2004 at 9:32 PM
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i hear ya brutha
i've proposed this idea to msn, but i don't think they want to get involved with a grey area such as file sharing. quite simply they should engineer a few search spiders for the sundry p2p nets. similar to ircspy or packetnews, but not just for xdcc, but all the p2p nets. fasttrack, msn, ftp, irc, http. how difficult could it be to scour for raw binary file data instead of strings? if we think of the net as a cyberdesktop, in principle it is just an extension of the desktop search tool.
obvi, there are so many issues with this it makes pandoras box look like davy jones locker, don't ask me what i mean by that. but would it be innovative, yes, and out from the starting gates, extremely popular.
jm2c - #2 Robert Scoble on 12.13.2004 at 11:38 PM
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I can tell that you haven't used EITHER Google or MSN's desktop search if you think we're copying Google on this one.
- #3 Robert Scoble on 12.13.2004 at 11:39 PM
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Watch the videos here: http://channel9.msdn.com -- the demos go into pretty good depth about how this is pretty cool stuff.
- #4 Jonathan Hardwick [MSFT] on 12.14.2004 at 12:54 AM
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You don't need to leave the search box on your taskbar - unlock the task bar and drag the search box onto your desktop. It'll sit there happily in the background and then pop up whenever you hit Ctrl-Alt-M (or whatever else you set the shortcut key to)
- #5 James Avery on 12.14.2004 at 2:38 AM
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Scoble,
Feel free to disagree with me but don't tell me I am a liar. I do in fact have both of them installed and have used them both. The fact of the matter is that Google came out with a desktop search that integrated with their online results, MSN is now doing the same thing.
-James - #6 Shannon J Hager on 12.14.2004 at 4:00 AM
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Although I do agree that MSN didn't really copy Google Desktop Search (they copied good desktop search products, a category Google's isn't in), I disagree with his suggestion that you watch the videos. They are 70% worthless. That would be okay if they weren't so dang long. If you want to know about the product or features, wait a day and read a blog post. Watching a 52 minute video in order to get 15 minutes of useful info isn't worth the time.