One of my favorite features within Windows Vista is the new built-in Search. Sure there has been "Search" in previous versions of Windows AND there were even some indexing features, but Windows Vista provides a much richer experience to the user AND it searches more than just the local files.
First off, Windows Vista Search is now a built in feature of the operating system. There is a version of the search engine that's available to Windows XP users, but you won't have the same user experience as you will in Windows Vista. The main application, today, that uses the Windows Desktop Search on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is Microsoft Outlook 2007.
By the way, if your a Microsoft Partner and using the latest Demo Showcase for Windows Vista, this blog post provides a nice "Lap" around this subject. Many customers like seeing this demo. It typically only take about 3-5 minutes to do the demo.
Getting started with Windows Vista Search is pretty easy. Let's take a more screenshot approach to explaining all of this.
To get started, click on the Windows button (this replaces the "Start" button in previous versions of Windows)
After clicking on the Windows button, the cursor will now be set in the new search textbox within the Windows menu. From here you can start typing for what you're looking for.
In the following example, I typed in the work "Virtualization". As you can see, I get a nice subset of search results from my "Favorites and History" (this is using the new Add-In for search. Check the Downloads section at the end of this blog), Files, and Communications (this is pulling from my Outlook 2007 email).
At this point you'll get a Windows Explorer window with all of the results from you search. But let's say that I always seem to look for the same type of information, but the content changes each week or month. Instead of going through the manual steps of defining a search query (our example of "Virtualization" was simple, but we could have a more complex search query), we can actual save the current query by clicking on the "Save Search" button.
Now whenever we want to pull out a "Saved Search" (aka Search Folders), we just navigate to the location where stored that search and open it up.
So what kind of control do you have over search anyhow? Well it turns out that we have a number of options to choose from. Within the Control Panel (using Classic View), double-click the "Indexing Options".
From here you'll see a list of all the locations that are indexed by Windows Vista.
To manage this list, you click on the Modify button. You'll now see subset of items that were defined in the previous list. This list is based on the current user. This will allow a user to opt-out of having their email and local documents to be searched.
To add, modify, or remove an indexable location, click on the "Show all locations" button which will also require administrative rights (Thus you'll be prompted by User Account Control (UAC) in order to proceed). From here, you have a great amount of control to define what data you'd like indexed.
Going back to the main Index Options control panel window, click on the "Advanced" button (again you'll be prompted by UAC). From here you can further control the behavior of the Indexing service as well as the behavior of search. One very interesting features is the "Treat similar words with diacritics as different words" option. This options is to improve search to work with non-English characters that use special symbols. For more information on diacritics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diacritic. You also have the option of changing the location of the index. This could be useful if your current OS partition is starting to get full or just slow.
Using the "Add UNC Location" tab, you can add a UNC Path (E.g. Network location or Mapped Drives) to the index).
Keep in mind that this is NOT a replacement to a centralized Enterprise search server such as Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) 2007. Using MOSS, you no longer need each desktop to search the same network content. This is a bit of a waste of space in a medium or large business. However, in a small workgroup of 5-10 users, you could get away with just Windows Vista, but it also depends on the amount of new content and the size of that content.
But wait….there's more…
Within Windows Explorer (Windows button > Computer), you have even more Search options. Click on the Organization button and select "Folder and Search Options"
Within the Search tab, you have additional options to control search on your desktop.
In the "What to search" section, the default value ("In indexed locations, search filenames and contents. In non-indexed locations, search file names only." will work on the options that we defined in the "Index Options" windows via the Control Panel. We can override this behavior, but the search may now also look for results even within non-indexed locations. Not sure why this would be useful, but I'm sure there is some dude who needs it and loves it. Me not that dude. J
An interesting option is the "Use natural language search" which allows you to use searches like "email from suzie from last week". If you use this feature, be sure you have a CPU with some muscle! An Intel Centrino Duo will do just fine. Here is another good blog post on this subject: http://mike.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!FBABF8E542F5D5DB!7837.entry
For more information on Windows Vista search, checkout this Microsoft Help page: http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/Windows/en-US/help/73106209-6df0-432a-8cb7-df5d8ce02ec61033.mspx
Preview Pane
Whenever I get into the subject of Searching, I typically show off the new Preview Pane within Windows Explorer as it helps with the whole "Finding the right content" task. Using Windows Explorer (Windows button > Computer), click on the Organize>Layout menu option. Then select "Preview Pane".
Now within Windows Explorer you'll have a third pane on the right hand side. When you select a document, you'll get a "preview" of that document. This removes the need to open a given document just to "peak" at it to see if it's what you're looking for. Very cool!
Downloads: