Actually, have you tried installing it regardless of the warning? You shouldn't need anything greater than what you've got even though it says it's "recommended" as it integrates with the shell Explorer and not IE.

I think you are being very harsh on it.

Yes, IE sucks but you don't need it for the download and the desktop search itself - just the toolbars that come with it.

The desktop search itself is very, very impressive. Lightning fast and very accurate. Far better than Google desktop search or the inbuilt search in WinXP which is so slow and doesn't categorize things well.

The MSN toolbar itself is also not that bad, good intergration with the various MSN based apps.

I won't be switching back to IE by any chance, but I think you guys at Mozilla need to be aware that this could catch you out - if IE had tabbed browsing and decent CSS rendering, I'd be almost willing to switch back because of this desktop search.

Asa, do give it a shot as it's really very impressive once it's done indexing.

It cracks me up that the first feature listed for the toolbar is "Find anything on your computer". So is Microsoft basically admitting that the Search features built into Windows are complete crap? Lovely.

I seem to like the MSN search better than google's version. For now, at least. I like that there are many types you can search for, including folders, which is handy. I like that I can tell it to start indexing right now, where as google will do it only when it feels like it. In the future, google will likely include firefox support, and MSN will not, which may be its downfall (for me).

I would love to like google's desktop search more than MSN, but I can't.

I am using Copernic DS, and it is very good. It is fast,easy and it allows me to specify addition filetypes to index, e.g. all my source code.

@XP search: The only problem is that it searches normally doesn't go through the indexing service, which is actually good. Check out Asa's link to http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=20214 You may need to setup addition directories to index. Perhaps One should make a review of all 3(4) one day

So I've been using Windows XP for three years and it's only today that I find out how to make it actually exploit the indexing service when searching?!

I'm not quite sure why Microsoft is doing all this desktop search stuff under the MSN banner. I mean MSN is the friendly, bright consumer Internet division. But one of the things this MSN Desktop Search does is add better searching to Outlook, the serious corporate mail client. The two just don't mesh. Maybe I just think about these things too much.

IE is up to Service Pack 2 now. But you shouldn't have to download the whole thing. Assuming you have some version of Windows, you should be able to get an upgrade (only about 15MB).

But why bother?

I prefer Copernic's searcher too before Google's (yuck! amazingly poor for coming from Google and involving *searching*, it doesn't even find partial matches, id3 data, and so on!) and Microsoft's.

I personally don't need any kind of "desktop search" since the files are well-organized using the directories. File names are also self-descriptive. ;-)

What, are you saying you can give files non-systematic names!?

I've just put it all in the root with names like 000001.txt, 000002.txt, 000001.png, and so on!

Installing MSN's Desktop Search won't stop you from using Firefox to take back the web, or whatever it is that you do with it. I use Firefox exclusively for my browsing, but am already addicted to the MSN desktop search.

Sure, if I bring up the full result browser (instead of just using the Deskbar), it loads in something that might be IE or it might be Windows Explorer (the file management side), but either way, it actually behaves *as I want it to*, unlike a web page: I can right click results and get the same context menu I'd expect to see for an icon on the desktop. I can drag and drop, multi-select, etc: all the things I expect for local search results (my big disappointment with Google).

The Inquirer article was a bit disingenuous: if it said "Microsoft builds on existing Microsoft technology! Shock!" that would adequately sum it up. The experience is much, much nicer with the Deskbar to search. The built-in indexing service has fewer filters, is a pain to access, doesn't have the cool Find-As-You-Type feature, doesn't support the "=cmd" features or the "@" options, etc, etc.

Again, don't be afraid to try it out. It uninstalls cleanly if you want it to. There's no need to look at web pages with anything except Firefox. It respects your privacy settings.

...further to what I wrote above, by way of example: if I enter "@dict,http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=$w" to the Deskbar, I can then write "dict ", and the results open in Firefox (my default browser).

There's nothing really IE specific about the desktop search, but it's a beta of the MSN Toolbar *Suite*... and the MSN Toolbar (not desktop search) is an IE-only thing (and who cares?)

First of all, I should say that I use Mozilla suite almost exclusively.
I would have some comments: Internet Explorer cannot be uninstalled. Intenet Explorer is not made of IEXPLORE.EXE, but it is hugely based on stuff like mshtml.dll, files that will never leave your system32 folder. Hence you don't need to download it, you can install it from the Windows CD, with "Add/remove Windows components", and the operation is shorter than one minute (proving that Internet Explorer had never left you).
You are using Internet Explorer in a daily basis without knowing it, because mshtml.dll is used for rendering the Windows Explorer interface and even you desktop. Because you're using it, you should update it! Otherwise you'll get those horrible spyware that scared you so much. Just opening local files is enough to hurt you plenty (at least before XP's SP2).
Microsoft makes a good deal of distributing its updates though magasines such as PC Mag etc., at least here in Romania, where broadband is pretty rare.
IE6 SP1 is not an update to your browser, but to your OS.
If you take a look in the Temp folder created by the IE6 SP1 installer (left on your PC after installation, in order to be reused), it has only 11MB (on a XP system) and that's what you would download if you would use the net installer.
You had one or two years to download this, but Mozila's updates are 11 MB EACH 3 MONTHS, because it feels too much for geeks: 1. to develop patches (or at least to hide the uninstallation for my mother-in-law eyes), 2. to stick to a model, making at least 2-3 files identical in consecutive versions of the browser.