Written recently on CNET is an author claiming that the reason most people use Google for internet searching is habitual and nothing more.

I was forced to agree with this after trying it out for myself - but only after that. Originally my thought was that Google’s search is unmatched and there’s no way Yahoo search or Live search can compare.

But I was wrong.

After performing several searches using generic words (like computer) and then advanced phrases (like tampa red light camera), the results were surprising. No matter which I used, the relevance of the results - which is what counts the most - of the search results were up to speed using all three search providers.

You can think of relevance by asking a simple question when you see the search results, that being, "Was this what I was looking for?" If the answer is yes, the results were relevant. If not, they weren’t.

There was a time when Google was far superior to any other internet search provider - and this was for years. But it would appear Yahoo and Live have caught up. And in some cases the rivals perform better than Google. Example: A search for tampa florida on Yahoo returns a "Top Rated Things To Do" for that area; it’s useful and very visible. It also lists better-placed advertising for apartments and rentals; something many who search for Tampa want to know about.

Do you use Google for everything search?

You might be using it only out of habit.

Windows ships with a very functional search tool, but to take advantage of its full functionality and speed you have to have the notorious “Indexing Service” running in the background. As you may know, this service can be a beast in terms of resource consumption. While disabling this service doesn’t break the Windows search functionality, it does severely cripple it. For an alternative, check out voidtools’ Everything.

Pointing out the biggest advantage from their FAQ:

How long will it take to index my files?
“Everything” only uses file and folder names and generally takes a few seconds to build it’s database. A fresh install of Windows XP SP2 (about 20,000 files) will take about 1 second to index.
1,000,000 files will take about 1 minute.

In addition to an “instant” (relatively speaking) index, Everything offers several other attractive features:

• Regular expression support.
• Minimal resource usage.
• Free

If you currently use the Windows search tool or another tool, Everything is definitely worth taking a look at.

Bookmark management in all web browsers is terrible. All of them. You would think that something as simple as searching for a bookmark would be simple and easy to do but it usually isn’t.

In Firefox 3 you can at least search your bookmarks easily if you know how to do it. Fortunately this is quite easy. All you have to do is use your address bar. Just type in a word or two and your bookmarks are auto-searched along with browser history.

Most of the time your bookmarks are listed first, and that’s good. You will know if a search result is a bookmark because there will be a gold star next to the listing.

Below is a screenshot of what this looks like.

While this may not be perfect (sometimes the search is a bit too "picky"), at least you have some ability to search bookmarks.

Microsoft recently released version 4 of Windows Desktop Search so I decided to check it out. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, launch Internet Explorer, head over to http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com, do a "Custom" (instead of "Express") install and you’ll see the option to download it there. It’s free.

WDS installs itself in the taskbar and will look something like this:

I have the indexing window purposely open in that screen shot because when you first install it it will take time to index everything. If you don’t have the indexing window open, you will know WDS is doing something by a fade-in/fade-out magnifying glass icon next to the clock (you can see it in the screenshot above).

The Big Question: Is this better than the standard built-in XP search?

Yes.

But it depends what you’re looking for.

My biggest gripe: E-Mail searching

I do like the fact you can search thru e-mails without having the client running. If you use Outlook, Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail, WDS is a nice little shortcut to search thru mail quickly.

The only drawback is that it doesn’t show the title of e-mails, just the cryptic-looking file names.

Like this:

Not cool.

There is a specific way you could use WDS where you can see the information that matters when e-mail searching. You have to use the "big" version (by clicking the magnifying glass icon), then click "E-Mail" then purposely select "Large icons" and then you can see e-mail content when searching for it.

Big pain in the rump if you asked me.

Searching everything else? Does just fine.

Aside from the e-mail searching b.s., this is a genuinely good utility for finding anything else in XP. It does find things faster than the standard search does.

Will this slow down your computer?

Only on older systems - especially during the indexing process. For example, I’d never put this on a computer with a Celeron processor in it or on any anything with under 1GB of RAM.

How to uninstall in case you don’t like it

Easy enough: It’s listed as Windows Search 4.0 in your Add/Remove via Control Panel.

Looks like this: