Primordial Ooze

… at home anyway. For some reason, I was getting increasingly unhappy with the performance of MSN Desktop Search at home. I was always torn between the merits of the Google and Microsoft offerings. The feature of MSN Desktop Search which pushed me over the edge was their neat “macro” feature. I could define little keywords and map them to arbitrary web links. Thus, a definition like the one below would substitute whatever I type in place of the $w. Consider this macro definition:

@wiki,http://www.primordia.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/$w

If I then typed:

wiki FrontPage

My browser would launch and I’d go here:

http://www.primordia.com/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/FrontPage

First, I find myself not using that feature like I used to. Second, the only other feature which inspired me to choose MSN Desktop search was the “richness” of the results window. Since the results window was basically Windows Explorer and Microsoft wrote a custom extension to implement such features as “Open Containing Folder” and “Thumbnail View”.

Despite the fact that the Google Desktop Search uses a browser, in my case Firefox, it manages to pull off some of these platform-dependent features you wouldn’t expect a browser to handle. The implementation is simple, I believe. The browser talks to a local web server that’s embedded into the Google Desktop Search engine. For specific “open folder” requests, the platform-specific web server goes and opens t he window. Firefox doesn’t need that capability.

I am further inspired to use the Google offering because I find myself using Google Talk and my Gmail account more and more. The ever-growing feature list of the Google sidebar are starting to reel me in.