Tips and Tricks with MSN Desktop Search!

I’ve really become a fan of MSN Desktop Search at work. I don’t really use the toolbar at all, because I’ve got tabbed browsing in both Firefox and the IE7 beta, but the search features are great. I also like it better than Google’s offering because the results don’t pull up in a webpage. Even with all the buzz over AJAX lately, there is still a lot more interaction that can happen with a true client application.

Anyway, on to Desktop Search. It makes finding emails SO MUCH easier. The ability to use special search keywords makes it even better. For example, let’s say I wanted to find all emails from me. Here’s what I could do:

kind:mail from:David Mohundro

Voila! I now have all emails from me. The kind keyword lets you specify things like mail, pictures, documents, etc. If you want to get even more detailed, you can use things like the ext keyword and specify file extensions. Here’s a search to find all icon files that have ‘mail’ in the name.

ext:ico mail

I haven’t seen an all-encompassing list of all of the different keywords that you can use with Desktop Search, but there are quite a few if you’ll look in the Desktop Search Help under Advanced Users.

And don’t forget to use CTRL+ALT+M to get focus to your search box!

NOTE: If you’re running into performance problems with it, check out this KB download. It really helped speed Desktop Search up on my PC. I couldn’t work without it now.