Microsoft looks to fix bugs with desktop search

Microsoft has slipped out a new version of its Windows desktop search engine for its Vista operating system to fix bugs with the previous version.

The release appeared more than a week after service pack one (SP1) hit the firm’s Windows Update site as a manual download for some Vista peeps.

Microsoft said on its Vista team blog that it had tweaked the search engine to rid it of most of the reported bugs in the current version that many have grumbled about.

However, it didn’t reveal which flaws remain in the new version, a preview of which was made available yesterday.

The software firm claimed that Windows Search 4.0 will boost performance by a third over Vista’s initial search query capabilities when the product first hit the market.

Microsoft has also built-in support for the search engine to index encrypted files and online delegate mailboxes. Redmond said the new version can also be used in Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.

Desktop-based search engines work by indexing all the files on a person’s PC which can lead to sluggish performance and nasty glitches.

Google last year spun out its own free app that indexes all the files on a computer, in yet another attempt by the internet search engine giant to take a swipe at Microsoft’s ubiquitous desktop presence.

That followed an interesting, somewhat out of character climbdown from Microsoft, which saw it agree to change Vista to level the desktop search playing field for Google and other third parties. ®