At Buzz’s prompting in an email this morning, I have downloaded and installed the new MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with desktop search functionality. Although I understand that this thing has impressed Scoble (not surprising) and a few others, it may suffer from the Desktop Search on training wheels that Google’s Desktop Search also suffer’s from, which is that there doesn’t appear to be any way to edit a list of known plain-text file extensions that the user would like to index. Both Copernic and X1 have this invaluable feature.

One feature that none of the desktop search companies seems to have figured out is that indexing when a computer is on battery power is a Very Bad Thing. Why can’t they check to see if a computer is on AC or battery power, and only perform indexing when on AC (or at least give users the option)? This just seems like common sense to me, but has been completely overlooked in all of the Desktop Search suites I’ve tried.

I have to say that my brief experience with this new MSN Toolbar hasn’t been wonderful. There’s no obvious preview functionality like both X1 and Copernic offer. For me, that’s two strikes already against it. We’ll see how long it lasts on my system. The one thing going for it is that Buzz says that hooks have been provided to allow ActiveWords to build an agent to allow ActiveWords to have unfettered access to the toolbar’s search capabilities. That intruiges me.

By the way, ActiveWords rules.

[Update] Marc’s mini-review of MSN’s Desktop Search sums up my thoughts perfectly. Decent enough beta, but not good enough for prime-time.