Tuesday, February 01, 2005
MSN Desktop Search refresh - fixes virus problem
I previously gave up using MSN Desktop Search, since it kept triggering my virus detector due to its method of writing extracted email attachments to disk.
Microsoft have acknowledged this was a major design flaw, and have addressed it with a refresh of the tool. The search now streams the data direct to the search filter, rather than writing it to disk - which has the secondary effect giving better performance.
This new way of working relies on the plugin IFilters that MSN Search uses implementing IPersistStream as well as IPersistFile - which the Microsoft provided ones already do, but some third party ones may not. The page on the Channel 9 wiki has more on this.
The MSN blog announcement also notes this update (which does not autoupdate) has the following additional fixes:
Microsoft have acknowledged this was a major design flaw, and have addressed it with a refresh of the tool. The search now streams the data direct to the search filter, rather than writing it to disk - which has the secondary effect giving better performance.
This new way of working relies on the plugin IFilters that MSN Search uses implementing IPersistStream as well as IPersistFile - which the Microsoft provided ones already do, but some third party ones may not. The page on the Channel 9 wiki has more on this.
The MSN blog announcement also notes this update (which does not autoupdate) has the following additional fixes:
- Ability to index Outlook items when it isn’t your default email client
- Clear Deskbar text after performing searches
- Fixed a majority of reported Dr. Watson bugs
- Several bug fixes to improve overall stability & robustness
# posted by zmarties @ 2/01/2005 08:25:00 am 
