Why must Microsoft lose in desktop search?

It's sad but it's true. I have been meaning to post this entry. As a matter of fact, I have posted quite a number of entries regarding the ever competitive world of Desktop Search. This time, it's another development and it will certainly change the way you look at MSN's Desktop Search.

The three competing products that I have experienced was OS X Tiger's Desktop Search (Spotlight), Google's Desktop Search and Microsoft's MSN Desktop Search.

One of the most frustrating bits about this desktop search technology was that it doesn't index documents in real-time - that is the moment a file is created or copied into the hard disk, the file will not be included in the search results until much later.

This was an issue that Spotlight took note of and had it resolved. Kudo's to the Apple people.

In the PC world, Google was one of the few to release beta versions of their Desktop Search software and during the beta stage, this problem persisted, documents created couldn't be found in real-time, it took sometime before the utility recognized the newly created or copied files. So imagine this, you have recently typed one of the longest masterpieces in your novel writing career, got the file saved and for some reason forgot where you saved the file. Google Desktop search; during it's beta release wouldn't be able to find that file. You'll have to leave the computer idle for a bit, say 10-15 minutes, before you can get the newly saved file included in the search results.

This problem was not only occuring in Google's Desktop Search (Beta) but also Microsoft's Desktop Search (Beta).

A couple months have passed and being pro-Microsoft when it comes to software apps, I got my system installed with the latest release of Microsoft's Desktop Search. The problem persisted. The only way to get around it was to force the Desktop Search application to "reindex" the drive to ensure all newly created files are indexed. This, I thought was a feasable solution until I discovered that Google have released the latest version of their Desktop Search. I heard from a friend that Google's Desktop Search was intelligent enough and he had no such problems in searching for newly created files.

I got Google Desktop Search downloaded and had it run side by side Microsoft's offering. I created a file on the desktop and immediately searched for the newly created file through Google's engine and true enough - it was INCLUDED in the INDEX! I then tried MSN Desktop Search - and no results were found. This speaks plenty. Google's Desktop Search is more intelligent and constantly scans the drive for new files while Microsoft's offering doesn't.

My questions is WHY??? One thing for sure, Microsoft's offering has a much more intuitive interface but takes longer to load and does not provide realtime monitoring of the drive while Google's offering provides a much simpler (but not necessarily good) interface but has faster loading times and constantly monitors the drive.

So what do I have now? I have got both Google and Microsoft's offering running side by side. This way, I get the best of both worlds, when I do not need to search for files created less than a day ago, I will use Microsoft's offering to take advantage of its highly intuitive user interface while Google will be used to search for files created within the day.

My message to the development teams of both tools...

Microsoft
Great interface but PLEASE work on faster startup times and monitoring of files
Google
The search is great... but PLEASE work on the interface