Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Microsoft Catalog Index

A unknown Microsoft (2000 and up) service is the Indexing Catalog. Not very easy to setup, it build a index like GDS and CDS before you can use it. After that it will show you that form to perform your query :



Well, its fast, and that's it. In a test query I made on MCI versus a normal (slow) search with the research tool provide by Microsoft it found only 8 of the 19 files I got. The MCI missed 7 Word documents and 4 Word backup documents. But it is the only tools I saw for now, who perform also searches in CSS.

The lack of a nice GUI interface, the number of clicks to reach it and a glitch in the Help screen Advanced Query Syntax give me a very bad first impression.

Thanks to Dodgers Webstractions.

I will comeback on this in a Desktop Search tools comparaison soon !

1 comment:

Ronnie T. Dodger said...

Eric - I too noticed the bug on the Advanced Syntax button. Nice to know that it is not just my machine.

This thing is somewhat of a curiosity, more than anything. But there is a lot of documentation on an API that you can use to program applications with. I know of a couple of Desktop Search software that does use it.

You can apparantly script this with javascript, vbscript, etc. via DHTML forms. If that is the case, I would think somebody over at Mozilla will be able to figure this thing out and maybe come up with an extension to leverage the Index Server from within the browser ... wouldn't that be great?!?