Microsoft today announced the immediate availability of their MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search.
The updated suite features "Windows Desktop Search" technology, a powerful, easy to use application that indexes users machines allowing them to search within seconds. Using one tool, people can search more than 200 file types on their PC including Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail files; Outlook Contacts or Calendar files; multimedia files; Microsoft Office Word 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint® 2003 files; MP3, GIF and JPEG files; Adobe or .PDF files. People can even search e-mail attachments.
In future developers will be able to create addins for the Toolbar suite taking advantage of the plug-in architecture third-party ifilters from https://addins.msn.com to extend the variety of file types that can be indexed and searched.
We exclusively revealed the existence of the MSN Toolbar Suite 2 and Tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer last month. Unfortunately due to a buggy implementation of tabs during Beta the MSN team have prosponed the release, according to an MSN spokesperson the functionality will be available in "the coming months".
For those on Windows XP 64bit it's no surprise that Microsoft have again decided to ditch support for the recently released operating system. Although the beta installed on x64 the final edition isn't supported. It's not clear whether Microsoft plans to support this in the future.