Remember what I said about PIDLs?
And never wanting to see one again? I seriously have spent hours over the last few nights trying to figure out a seemingly random error that would occur every few searches (sometimes every 10th, sometimes every 40th) in the search app I’m building. It turned out the problem went back to that self-inclusive length property that’s part of the SHITEMID structure (ie. the IDL part of the PIDL). So I’ve fixed that. As such, my current code won’t support queries over 92 characters in length, but that’s only temporary.
So now that I’ve got that working smoothly, I can start working on actually making something useful. I’ve got some ideas, but I need more!
If you look at the screenshot I posted — I can give you some idea of how it works at this moment. When you launch the app the “What to look for,” “Where to look,” and “Group by” widgets are all that you see. When you check “Documents,” the Documents options appear (and the search immediately updates to show just documents).
I’d like to offer two main uses for this app:
1) Better searching. By exposing search fields like the Author field you see above. And by giving you advanced options relevant to the type of item you’re looking for.
2) Search by browsing. If you’ve seen Tesla or the Longhorn demo that was given during Bill Gates’ keynote at WinHEC today, you’d know how great this idea is. Unfortunately, because I don’t have any direct access to the data indexed by MSN yet, I can’t pull out tags like “authors” (looks something like this). I hope that a future release of the MSN DS will allow us to do grouping in that way, one way or another.
Actually, I’ve given myself a third goal:
Convert Chris from Copernic 😉
Winbeta has a first look at Longhorn
The WinHEC build (5048) is in the hands of some visitors already.
You guys can do better than this…
Quick progress
This is why I love developing in .NET
Hopefully later this week or next I’ll be able to post a beta version and start looking for some feedback (although feel free to post any right now, just know that this is very early work).
Success!!!
After painstaking effort (If I never see another PIDL it’ll be too soon)… I have bent the MSN shell extension to my will!
Edit: Just noticed this was my 100th post. Fancy, that. Oh and don’t worry, I have much prettier/more useful plans for this application given its new abilities. I’ve also fixed some bugs in the shortcut creation routine (even what I posted the other day still has a ~100 character query limit).
Google warming up to RSS?
Apparently some G-mail users now have access to “Google Clips” – which lets them view RSS feeds inside of Gmail.
Time warp….
I wrote this on the plane, but didn’t get around to posting until now. Take it,
First, let me tell you a little more about
The only negative comment I made the entire time was about the traffic. But pretty much every city ever has more traffic than
On to Search Champs…
There are many things I’d love to tell you about that I cannot, because of the NDA. Fortunately, though, plenty of interesting stuff (especially the info regarding MS Research projects we saw) is exempt from that agreement. You can be sure I’ll be blogging about one of the desktop search-related projects, named Tesla, very soon.
Regarding the MSN Search team themselves, I cannot praise them enough for their passion and desire to make their products and services better. Unfortunately, it sometimes seems that they’re being held back.
The most important advice I could give the MSN Search team was this:
You cannot get ahead by following the leader. On this market’s current path, Google is moving faster than you. So how do you get ahead? Forge a new path for the market. Make Google turn around and say, “Shit, how did we miss that turn?”
Historically, this approach is not new to Microsoft. They used to do it all the time. In fact, I think their Xbox division is doing it right now.
Improving your basic search relevancy is important, and I’d never say otherwise. But you guys need to focus on features that Google lacks. And show your customers how they can be more productive on your engine. Focus on Search Clustering. If you roll that out before Google does, and show people how great it is (if you need help there, e-mail me)… I bet you’ll see your userbase double overnight.
First Xbox 2 commercial
They finally figured out how to get geeks to watch ESPN…
http://www.easports.com/games/madden06/nextgen.jsp
Desktop Search hack updated and fixed.
My post Calling MSN Desktop Search from your Application has been updated.
A major flaw was discovered because I wasn’t updating the length fields in the PIDL structures. Since I didn’t do very thorough testing (ie. testing input strings longer than 7 characters) the problem wasn’t immediately apparent.
This has been fixed.
Photos from Search Champs v2
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/searchchamps/