Windows Search 4.0 preview: first impressions

I just finished downloading and installing the Windows Search 4.0 Preview and I must say I’m impressed by the results. File system searches are now blazingly fast (at least within indexed folders), while preview images of even complex documents pop-up almost instantly. Even Outlook seems to have gotten a speed boost. Searching for an object using the All Mail Items option is no longer a coffee-break-inducing endeavor.

Overall, it’s a major improvement over the integrated desktop search in Vista and Server 2008 (it updates them seamlessly), and it also serves as a nice upgrade for users of Windows Desktop Search under XP. There’s even a version for Server 2003 showing that Microsoft still knows how to develop in a platform-independent fashion when the mood strikes them.

Of course, there are areas where Windows Search could be improved. For starters, Microsoft still hasn’t provided an inline Preview Pane filter for XPS documents. Adobe provides one for PDF files, and screen shots that are purportedly from the Windows 7 Milestone 1 pre-release seem to show such a filter exists – at least in a future form. Why Microsoft continues to hobble XPS in this manner (anti-trust fears?) is beyond me.

Note: The folks over at MSDN Magazine came up with their own set of “Managed Preview Handlers” early last year as part of an article on the topic of writing such plug-ins for Vista. They include handlers for XPS, ZIP, MSI, CSV, BIN and XAML file types. Definitely worth a look.

Even with the MSDN handler, XPS documents still take way too long to load, especially on the first attempt. Microsoft needs to thoroughly tweak this bit of code if it ever hopes to establish XPS as a viable document interchange standard. That said, the handler does save you the trip to Internet Explorer, which makes the pain of finding and downloading the MSDN solution and accompanying J# redistributable package worth the effort.

And, finally, no Microsoft “upgrade” would be complete without a thorough rehashing of the underlying data store. In this case, it means that your existing search index gets dumped and you have to wait while a new index is built before you can actually search for anything (a time-consuming process for users with large storage needs). But since this is the only real blemish on an otherwise sterling release, I can let it slide.

Bravo, Microsoft, for showing the tangible side of all those Research division dollars. And to think, these are the same folks who brought us “Bob!”