Search Changes Coming in Vista SP1 -- Visual Studio Magazine

Search Changes Coming in Vista SP1

By Keith Ward
08/29/2007

Although Microsoft didn't mention it in today's announcement about the upcoming release of Windows Vista SP1, the company confirmed today that one of the major changes will be to open up desktop search functionality to competition.

The changes will make it much easier for users to pick tools other than Microsoft's Instant Search to find information stored on local hard drives. Also benefiting will be OEMs and third-party vendors, who will find it less onerous to include their search technologies in Vista.

Microsoft, through a spokesperson, laid out the major changes to desktop search in SP1:

"Computer manufacturers and consumers will be able to select a default desktop search program similar to the way they currently select defaults for third-party web browsers and media players in Windows Vista.
Links to the default desktop search program will be provided on the Start menu and in Windows Explorer windows.
Microsoft will provide information to developers of third-party desktop search programs about how they can optimize their programs to minimize any performance problems."

Microsoft agreed to the changes to settle charges leveled against it by Google about anti-competitive practices in Vista's desktop search. Google, in a complaint filed in U.S. District Court last December, claimed that Microsoft made it nearly impossible for third parties to provide alternatives to Instant Search, effectively shutting out competition.

Google claimed that such a move violated Microsoft's agreement to avoid monopolistic practices when it lost the famous antitrust case in the late 1990s.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.
VS Code Copilot Previews New GPT-4o AI Code Completion Model

The 4o upgrade includes additional training on more than 275,000 high-quality public repositories in over 30 popular programming languages, said Microsoft-owned GitHub, which created the original "AI pair programmer" years ago.
Microsoft's Rust Embrace Continues with Azure SDK Beta

"Rust's strong type system and ownership model help prevent common programming errors such as null pointer dereferencing and buffer overflows, leading to more secure and stable code."
Xcode IDE from Microsoft Archrival Apple Gets Copilot AI

Just after expanding the reach of its Copilot AI coding assistant to the open-source Eclipse IDE, Microsoft showcased how it's going even further, providing details about a preview version for the Xcode IDE from archrival Apple.