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MSN Search ToolbarMSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search adds a comprehensive desktop search feature and mediocre tabbed browsing to Internet Explorer. Price: Free
by Timothy Captain 
Apple’s new Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger offers a fully integrated desktop search tool. Mozilla’s Firefox Web browser offers tabbed browsing. Microsoft hadn’t released a follow-up to either its Windows XP operating system or Internet Explorer 6 Web browser in four years. Something had to give.
Realizing Longhorn is at least a year away and that its operating system and browser lacked crucial features that the competition offers today, Microsoft has released a stopgap measure for improving both Windows and Internet Explorer. MSN Search Toolbar is a free, downloadable 8MB utility that adds a desktop search tool called Windows Desktop Search and a tabbed browsing function to Internet Explorer. How do these add-ons match up with the competition? When it comes to desktop searches, we found that the latest MSN Search Toolbar works nearly as well as Apple’s Spotlight search tool, but the configuration process with MSN Search Toolbar is flat-out clunky. Apple’s tool indexes every file on the computer, but MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search is unable to index certain files (most notably PDFs) without first downloading and installing a plug-in. When you first install the MSN Search Toolbar, be sure to select the option to index your entire hard drive. If you choose the default option to index only your e-mail (if you’re running Outlook or Outlook Express) and the My Documents folder, you’ll have a terrible time finding the configuration menu to change that option later on. Once you’ve gone through the initial setup, MSN Search Toolbar’s Windows Desktop Search feature works well. You can search for a file by typing a term into a text box on the taskbar in Internet Explorer or in Outlook. Windows Desktop Search lists the results with terrific previews, allowing you to peruse e-mail messages, read documents, and view digital photos. Because of the intuitive way it presents results, we consider Windows Desktop Search superior to Google Desktop for Windows. MSN Search Toolbar didn’t fare nearly as well when it came to making Internet Explorer as capable as Mozilla’s Firefox. Aside from adding a few icons to the toolbar for tasks such as Search Web, Highlight, Form Fill, and News, the only real feature it adds to Internet Explorer is tabbed browsing, which Firefox has offered for about a year. Tabbed browsing allows you to open new Web pages and access them with the tabs below the toolbar in Internet Explorer rather than be forced to open each page in a completely new browser Window. This is an elegant solution for people who tend to open scads of Web pages at once, particularly if you’re clicking links to news stories from a Web site’s front page. However, Microsoft managed to bungle this otherwise great feature by placing the Open in New Background tab and Open in New Foreground tab options toward the bottom of the popup menu when you right-click on a link, making them inconvenient to access. The Open in New Window option remains toward the top of the right-click menu. As for the Search Web feature on the MSN Search Toolbar, we apologize to Mozilla for even mentioning it in the same sentence as Firefox’s customizable search tool. Firefox allows users to enter a word or phrase, select a search engine like eBay, Google, or Yahoo from the dropdown list, and then use that particular engine to find your search term. You can easily add additional search engines, like Epinions, Froogle, and PriceGrabber. MSN Search Toolbar merely searches the Web with the MSN Search service. MSN Search Toolbar with Windows Desktop Search doesn’t bring Internet Explorer any closer to Firefox, but the addition of tabbed browsing certainly makes IE better than it was without it. If you insist on sticking with IE and need help finding wayward files on your hard drive, consider this a worthwhile upgrade. MSN Search Toolbar Specifications
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