Windows Desktop Search 2.6.5 Final

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Smigit, the problem for 99% of cases is not that WDS fails to shutdown, but rather that it takes too long. With all the I/O that's going on during the shutdown/restart of your computer, it can take a while for applications that need to write a lot of state out to disk when they close.

We rewrote a large piece of the indexer for this release with the goal of cutting down disk I/O and improving shutdown times. I believe in our tests we found that the "end task" dialog shows up in less than 12% of cases, dependent upon your machine performance and what else you have running. In these cases the offending executable is usually WindowsSearchIndexer.exe or WindowsSearchFilter.exe. In these cases, I would recommend that you just ignore the dialog as it should go away on its own within a couple of seconds.

If you've ever run a Windows "tweak" program or edited your registry to reduce the application shutdown timeout (default is 5 seconds), then you're going to see this more (and probably for other apps as well).

If the offending application is "wds_sl.exe" - you can try turning off the Customer Experience Improvement Program (under "quality" in WDS options) and see if that helps. Though I'm not aware of any reason you'd be seeing that particular executable show up since it should close immediately.

I'm sorry to hear that you're still seeing this problem. We focused a huge amount of time at addressing this issue, but unfortunately due to the nature of the beast it may not go away completely for a few people until the 3.0 version of WDS.

Of course, another workaround is to right-click on the WDS tray icon and click "exit" before you restart.

[john smith 1924 Veteran]

Can I just say a big thank you to Brandon for providing this support- looking at the post times (2am, 12am!) it's pretty impressive and generous. I'll have to admit - i'm a GDS user, but I'll download the most recent WDS and have a play. Thanks!

[tuckeratlarge]

Not wishing to play down your efforts, it's quite obvious it's a great app as with GDS. For the fast majority of the masses I can see a point to it.

If however, people just took the time in the first place to categorize and create a easy to find folder and file system, a desktop search utility is pointless.

I say this from my point of view, but I wholeheartedly support your work. Even though I will never use it myself I have recommended it to my more disorganised friends and colleagues.

[Glowstick]

What about 64bit Windows?

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Not wishing to play down your efforts, it's quite obvious it's a great app as with GDS. For the fast majority of the masses I can see a point to it.

If however, people just took the time in the first place to categorize and create a easy to find folder and file system, a desktop search utility is pointless.

Ahh, but I completely disagree! Desktop Search isn't just about finding something you lost. In fact, I pretty much never use it for that. I keep my filesystem very organized, mostly out of habit as I've been doing it that way for years now.

So what do I use it for? Getting to my stuff faster. Or providing far richer views over my data.

For instance, I have all of my music stored in a folder hierarchy that goes Genre -> Artist -> Album. But if I want to look at all the Moxy Fruvous songs I have, I have to look in 4 folders.

Or, I can just type "artist:moxy" into WDS and instantly have them all available in one view.

Back before I moved out here I lived on the east coast with 6 college friends. We all had media shared out on our boxes. With WDS, I had every person's share indexed on my PC and on our Media Center in the living room. So I could pull up anything from anywhere with just a few keystrokes.

It's even better for e-mail. You wouldn't believe how often I do a search for from:david or something like to:"wds feedback" preview bug.

All the Outlook rules in the world aren't going to help me find an e-mail from last week or last year that fast. And it's also great for searching things like RSS feeds inside of Outlook or Onfolio, for instance.

And this is only the beginning... I think when you see where we're going with this stuff, you'll be compelled to take another look (at least I hope so!). It's about a lot more than just search.

What about 64bit Windows?

Unfortunately Windows XP/2003 x64 editions are not currently supported. WDS in 64-bit builds of Windows Vista should have full parity with the 32-bit builds.

We are working on downlevel 64-bit support. Unfortunately I don't have a date to give you even if I could. As a strong x64 advocate (I've even contributed on Extended64.com in the past), this pains me. But unfortunately these things can take a lot of time. That said, last I knew we're on track to have full x64 support in the 3.0 version (this does not constitute a promise! Plans can and do change!)

[Menge]

i don't use search thingies apart from Spotlight, but i installed this on my windows box to check it out. it's still doing the initial indexing.

so far my search results for non-program related stuff (as in searching for a program executable/shortcut) are a bit poor. little relevancy. maybe it's because i told it to index my entire data drive (not just my documents or stuff like that). i'll just wait for it to finish indexing and use for a week or so to see how it evolves :)

Brandon, does WDS adapt its search results (relevancy of them, actually) to how much/when you accessed the files and so on? or is the results listing just a "static" list?

and how open are you to clear, written opinions/suggestions and eventual buggings as to why the thing works like it does? :p (i'm just one curious dude hehehe)

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Brandon, does WDS adapt its search results (relevancy of them, actually) to how much/when you accessed the files and so on? or is the results listing just a "static" list?

The first thing you might want to look at is what you're sorting by. I think for most filters, the default is to sort by Date. By clicking any of the columns headers you can sort by another column (like Rank, on the far left) just like any regular Explorer view. Our defaults are designed to have what we think are the most useful sort columns, and Date is usually what people want (especially for things like Email). For some, like Music, I believe the default is Rank.

The Rank column is based on a large number of factors, and I'm really not the right person to ask about how that works. But I do know that in our research, most users of WDS are interested in recall, not discovery (which is what you usually do on a web search), which makes static rank a lot less useful. Instead, most users can better get at what they want by sorting by date or Author or something like Genre.

We already have a lot of ideas about how to make the user experience even better when looking over your stuff. Filtering/Sorting/Grouping and things like that. But we're definitely open to new ideas!

and how open are you to clear, written opinions/suggestions and eventual buggings as to why the thing works like it does? :p (i'm just one curious dude hehehe)

Any bugs/suggestions/feedback that I read I will try to communicate to the rest of the team. If there's an actual bug that's reproducible I will make sure it gets logged in our database for tracking.

We do have other feedback channels like the WDS wiki on Channel 9. I know we have a new PM on our team focused on the user and developer communities, and I believe we'll have some new feedback channels available soon.

[Glowstick]

We are working on downlevel 64-bit support. Unfortunately I don't have a date to give you even if I could. As a strong x64 advocate (I've even contributed on Extended64.com in the past), this pains me. But unfortunately these things can take a lot of time. That said, last I knew we're on track to have full x64 support in the 3.0 version (this does not constitute a promise! Plans can and do change!)

Well, where's the hold up? The APIs are virtually 1:1 the same in 32bit and 64bit modes, apart from pointer lengths. Is the code not 64bit clean?

[mercury_rising]

I seem to recall Brandon saying that it was a Firefox problem. It happens with Opera too... :whistle:

Edit: Here's the quote.

Brandon, could you please confirm whether Desktop Search does or doesn't work with other browsers like Opera & Firefox? It's a real shame that the Search Web feature doesn't seem to play nice.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Brandon, could you please confirm whether Desktop Search does or doesn't work with other browsers like Opera & Firefox? It's a real shame that the Search Web feature doesn't seem to play nice.

It was designed to be browser independent. That's why it executes your default browser with the "? <search term>" parameter. But not all browsers accept that format. Oddly, Firefox used to but doesn't in 1.5, which I think might be a bug on their part.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Well, where's the hold up? The APIs are virtually 1:1 the same in 32bit and 64bit modes, apart from pointer lengths. Is the code not 64bit clean?

It's a lot more complicated than that. One of many examples would be IFilters. There are no 64-bit IFilters today. A 64-bit indexer process cannot load a 32-bit library to extract the contents/metadata of a file. Same for the protocol handlers, and dozens of other pieces like wordbreakers.

That's just one piece of it, as there are countless other issues including the timing of different releases and various dependencies, prioritization of Vista work, and the fact that many pieces of Desktop Search are owned by different teams sometimes with different priorities.

Another issue is the fact that WDS is a platform. We need to make sure we have a consistent experience not only for our users but for developers as well.

I don't want it to sound like I'm making excuses. We don't have x64 support and that sucks. But the best we can do is work on it and deliver it when it's ready.

[letsmoo]

WDS does look awesome java script:emoticon(':D', 'smid_3')

:D. I used to use Copernic Desktop. It was fast and did most of the search. Is WDS better than that?

And also I dont want to index my music, copernic has options for that, thats easy to change. Not sure WDS has it.

Edited April 17, 2006 by letsmoo

[jmc777]

And also I dont want to index my music, copernic has options for that, thats easy to change. Not sure WDS has it.

You can exclude folders from being indexed in WDS, so you could tell it to leave your music folder(s) alone.

[letsmoo]

You can exclude folders from being indexed in WDS, so you could tell it to leave your music folder(s) alone.

Cheers

[speedy_kevin]

Thanks Brandon!

Im sure gonna download it. Great app :)

[guru]

is there way to get deskbar centered in a double high taskbar

[STanger]

Thanks to a few audio and video projects I'm currently working on I really could use WDS for XP X64 I have almost 3TB worth of various file types that would make WDS a perfect addition to my XP X64 install ...

here's why .... approximately 1TB of audio files of all my band's recording going back to 1996, 500MB worth of pictures mostly of my kids, and about 1.5TB worth of video of my band's video we've been shooting lately for "s-n-s". Even though I have everything labeled and in it's own folder I know how WDS works and how u can work with files in the WDS search results ... It would greatly help me out if this were available in XP X64

Actually I use XP X64 for audio and video cuz the software tools I use are 64bit or 64bit compatible the biggest one being Cakewalk 64 for audio stuff. WDS X64 would be a tremendous help. Having to dig through folders to find the file(s) I need just slows me down productivity wise.

Thanks for any consideration,

STanger

[MPH]

Can WDS index IE history?

[Smigit]

If the offending application is "wds_sl.exe" - you can try turning off the Customer Experience Improvement Program (under "quality" in WDS options) and see if that helps. Though I'm not aware of any reason you'd be seeing that particular executable show up since it should close immediately.

Yeah thats the one and no customer experience program isnt enabled. I duno, I'll try keep it installed for the meantime although if it becomes a pain it'll prob have to go. Pretty annoying.

Is there any info I can suppy you that would be of assistance if this is an issue or do you think its to isolated to look into? Well ta, thanks for the pointers anyway...perhaps it'll run better in the next version when your running it as a service like you mentioned.

[cheukiecfu]

wds doesn't work when i try to use a "folder location" filter

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Is there any info I can suppy you that would be of assistance if this is an issue or do you think its to isolated to look into? Well ta, thanks for the pointers anyway...perhaps it'll run better in the next version when your running it as a service like you mentioned.

Does it repro every time you shutdown? Or just the once?

If you look in task manager, is wds_sl.exe always running? It shouldn't be, but it's possible that something is causing it to hang (and you don't notice until shutdown). Even that is unusual though as WindowsSearch.exe should kill that process if it doesn't respond.

I will make sure it gets looked into, though. If you ever see an Error Reporting dialog for wds_sl.exe - please choose to send it as those really do help quite a lot.

I'm not sure, but I think that particular component may be going away entirely in the next release anyway.

[Smigit]

doesnt repro every time, say 50% of the time. Anyway if it pops up I'll be sure to sent the error report along. thanks again.

[lhnz]

Are you referring to the Deskbar? If you press enter and open the full WDS results view, it should show Artist/Album/Genre/etc if you click on the "music" filter.

Also if you try "Large Icon" view, music items should have the album and genre listed in the description area.

Aside from that, we're definitely looking at a lot of great ways to improve views over your data in upcoming releases.

Ah yes, I was talking about the results that appear on the bottom of your screen as you type.

I personally use the program to search for particular filetypes at any one time. For example if I search for "the Who" I would like to be able to get only music results back, not lots of text files in which I have mentioned them etc...

Perhaps you could make it so that pressing a particular button while the cursor is in the search box could cycle through different "filters" (for example: Music, Photos, Documents, Videos, Everything [Default])?

Obviously you would have to show which one was selected in the search box somehow, and perhaps it would be best to have some other way of changing it other than a hotkey - or make it just an advanced option so that people don't accidentally get it stuck on music, and don't know how to get it so they can search for everything again...

On addition to this it would be nice, as if the search results for the different filetypes would not necessarily be the name of the file.

On my computer I store my music like so: "Artist/Album/05 Sometrackname.mp3"

I would like it if the Desktop search would display a tiny bit more information about the files it lists other than just their filename, possible use of ID3 tags.

Also, sometimes I cannot see why particular files are in my search results. I am not so sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but spurious results can be kind of confusing if I see no reason for them being there.

Basically what I would like is some of the features that you have in the full WDS results to be cut down and simplified and put in the smaller results. It should be possible, and if done in a nice simple way, and can be turned on/off useful.

(...my post was on page 2 if you wondered...)

The program seems pretty stable to me, and I think it is a keeper, certainly better than Googles offering.

[Brandon Live Veteran]

Those sound like great ideas Hanz.

In the meantime, if you're doing a search and you only want to see music, another option is to type "kind:music" as part of your query.

As for why certain results show up, if you open the full results view (by pressing Enter) the values that you searched for should show up as bolded text. Unfortunately, that doesn't help if the occurance is in a column that's not shown (and we index something like 250 columns worth of data!).