Microsoft To Change Desktop Search After Google Complaint

Raver32 writes to tell us that Microsoft will be making changes to their desktop search tool in Vista after a 49-page antitrust complaint was filed by Google. "Microsoft initially dismissed the allegations, saying regulators had reviewed the program before Vista launched. However, Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, said in an interview last week that the company was willing to make changes if necessary."

Re:Desktop Search? WTF?

[Constantine XVI]

Desktop search is a name for a program that constantly indexes your hard drive so the results come up instantly when you search for a file. Examples include Google Desktop Search (Win/Mac), Vista Desktop Search (Win), Spotlight (Mac) and Beagle (Lin)

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Sadly this so far means nothing...

[atarione]

i think you read the article wrong. last week they said they would make changes if necessary this week they said they would make changes

Re:Wow!..Not so much

[mhall119]

"OSX supported hardware" is not a market, it's a product. You can legally have a monopoly on a product (patent, copyright, trademark), but you can not (unless otherwise specified) have and use a monopoly on a market (Desktop computing) to give you an unfair advantage in another market (Internet Search).

Here Microsoft is using their Desktop monopoly to boost their online search business and (this is the illegal part) restricting their monopoly product from using someone else's online search business.

Re:For those who haven't been following the issue:

[Red Flayer]

Disabling the service does not disable it for all of Vista. If you read the original complaint, that was a major issue -- some actions would still call the MS Search instead of whatever other search tool the user wanted.

Use the API? Are you certain that the API provided by MS to third-party developers is the same as the one used my MS's search? As other posters have pointed out, this has been a problem in the past with MS.

Re:WDS slows down *everything*

[Vancorps]

huh? Last I checked it had the lowest priority and consumed only a max amount of memory, about 30megs worth, it would continue at that pace as long as there was no user activity for five minutes. It doesn't move other apps out of memory or even move them into virtual memory, if the app in question is actually doing something then the indexing service won't run. If the app is question is sitting idle then it has already been moved to virtual memory.

If you install it on an existing machine with lots and lots of files then install it and go to bed. In the morning it will be fine, no slowdown at all and then you'll have the added advantage of instant searching. If it's a new install then there aren't a lot of files to index so you'll be done in an hour.

That's just simply crap, I did all that on a Pentium M laptop with 1gig of ram and an 80gig hard drive. It doesn't affect performance in the slightest beyond taking up that additional 30megs of ram while it's running. It drops down to less than a meg when it is not running.

Spotlight is the exact same way, same with Beagle, there is simply no fast way to index several hundred thousand files while grabbing all the metadata that these products do.

Re:Sheep

[yorugua]

"Convicted monopolist". You guys crack me up. That phrase has 0 legal meaning.

First, IANAL.

Second: two things:

a) This link migth help : http://www.aaxnet.com/editor/edit019.html [aaxnet.com]
Read for example the portion of:

The Court of Appeals judged the case on merit rather than on prejudice. Microsoft lost on every single point. The court held that:

        * Microsoft does indeed poses a monopoly.
        * Microsoft has leveraged their monopoly in clear violation of the law.
        * The guilty verdict is completely sound and there is no reason to reconsider it.
        * Breaking up Microsoft is not an overly harsh penalty and could be re-imposed.

. Also, take a look at http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.ht ml?id=95000750 [opinionjournal.com]
b) google for "microsoft convicted monopoly" to improve understanding.

So, if they were really "convicted", then it might get new "legal meaning" if they go to court for the same reason once again. Also, I did not wrote that because of a legal meaning, I just said it because that what they seem they are, similar to when I talk about the blue sky, or about the white moon.

Re:Since when

[Tran]

I am not that up on linux, but as posts below indicate, locate only finds filenames, not file contents.
I suppose it is a step up form find, since it appears to maintain an index file.
But find is not a service constantly running as a service as I suppose locate would be. And DOS and windows also (have) come with a close equivalent of find, though not as flexible. The dir command works wonders in that respect.
No the desktop search is something completely different. It is not just a command line utiltiy. I do believe some kind of desktop utility like Vistas desktop search, Beagle, Spotlight or Google desktop search is a nice thing to have if you want it - but that is not the qeustion.
The question is can Vista desktop search be easily turned off? That is not so clear despite people claiming here that it can be stopped by disabling the service. I am sure that if we can think of ways to do so, so could the minds at Google. There may be something more to this than meets the eye, and I wouldn't think it is something simplistic. If it was simplistic I am sure Google could handle it.

Re:Wow!

[endianx]

If they want to conduct business in a country where I'm a voter....well, yes, I indeed expect them to do whatever the hell I want them to do.

Scary. I knew people thought this way, but I thought it was subconscious.

If you don't like the way a company does business, just don't buy their product.

Re:Wow!

[Chokolad]

> Keep in mind that before Google came in with a powerful search capability, Microsoft didn't have one yet. For all you know, if Google hadn't done one, Microsoft never would have done anything but the piss-poor dog-slow search they had previously. You think the next company will bother, if Microsoft is allowed to continually squash any product it decides it wants to squash?

They actually had a powerful search capability since NT4. It was not well exposed in GUI and was not running by default. It was called Indexing Service. Current Vista Search is modified Indexing Service + GUI. It was even done by the same team.

Re:Why don't they file against Apple?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Why don't they file against Apple? I mean, they have Spotlight and that's Apple-only and bundled, right?

Who the hell modded this "insightful?" First, Apple is not a monopoly, so they cannot illegally leverage that monopoly via bundling, hence there is no legal action that makes sense. Second, Google was not even complaining about the bundling (although they have every right to). They complained about two things:

• MS's search feature slows down other search features.
• MS's search feature uses undocumented APIs that provide an unfair advantage to competitors who don't happen to also have the source code and documentation to Windows.

Apple fits into neither of those categories. Google has an indexed search on OS X and it uses the same API and hooks as Spotlight, resulting in no slowdowns for Google's tool and no disadvantage given to them.

Are those enough reasons? If not, please RTFA before posting again.

Re:I think the problem is WHY they're doing things

[tcc3]

So they arent allowed to add valuable features to their OS any more? Maybe they should just go back to selling DOS to make sure there arent *any* of the last 20 years innovations in it.

I call shenanigans on your claim anyway. I believe indexed search was introduced into Windows with Win2k. Google's version may have been superior, but its not like they invented searching for stuff.

KDE Find.

[twitter]

As practical as locate is, it only matches your search to the list of names in the database; I cannot search for a document containing some word. ... I can teach my father how to use Beagle. I cannot teach him how to grep.

There are dozens of GUI front ends to grep that deliver most of the functionality. One of the easiest to use is the KDE find utility, which can search by content, file dates and all of that. Used in conjunction with a reasonable directory structure, you can get most of the benefits of an indexing search engine witout the performance hit. Real data mining this way is tedious, however, so I'd expect there are already free tools that someone has or will make a KDE interface for.

At the end of the day the real question is if you trust Google or M$ to mine your files for you. M$ will sell you for a nickel and Google can be forced by governments. This is why free software is the answer where you are doing anything you care about.