Microsoft Windows announced the release of stable version of “Windows Search 4.0”. Windows search is a desktop search engine by Microsoft that helps you find, preview, documents, e-mail messages, music files, photos & other computer related items.

he new updates Windows Search is also used by other Microsoft applications like Outlook 2007, Internet Explorer, Office. The 4.0 version comes with many enhancements and bug fixing as claimed by Microsoft the version in stable mode is available for Windows XP / Vista users.

Apart from desktop search and crawling your files locally the Windows search 4.0 can also go online and index you e-mails from other clients, or visit specific online locations to index your data. Though I am not a big fan of desktop searches due to the risk of violation of privacy and major chances of identity theft.

Microsoft has been using desktop search since Windows 95 but never made an attempt to improve its performance the previous version had the capability to only search the files names & there extension until in 2008 when Microsoft launched vista where the desktop search was improved.

Microsoft’s move to enhance its desktop search came after its rival Google launched Google desktop which introduced crawling desktops and collecting file information’s, emails, files, music, photos, chats, Gmail’s, web pages in history and then easily presenting this information to you on search query.

So far following are the enhancement made by Microsoft on the new found Windows Search 4.0

Enhancement Windows Search 4.0

• Support for encrypting file system
• Reduce affection Microsoft Exchange when you index e-mail in online mode.
• Support for indexing online delegate mailboxes
• Support for client-to-client remote query to shared indexed locations
• Improved indexing performance
• Faster previewer updates for Windows XP
• Per-user Group Policy Settings
• Windows software updates for Watson errors
• Support for the following new enterprise Group Policy Objects.

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