Back in May and September of last year, we looked in detail at Windows XP Desktop Search, and we still think it's pretty good. Once you've set the indexing options up correctly, you can, for example, find all documents that contain a certain word or phrase, as well as images containing that word or phrase in their filename or metadata tags.



It's a vast improvement on the standard XP Search Companion, both in speed and scope, but unlike the Search Companion, there's no provision to save a Desktop Search. However, there is a rather crafty workaround. Having made a search, go to the Favourites menu and 'Add to Favourites .' You could now create a new 'Searches' folder under Favourites, but this isn't mandatory.

You'll find that when you open Explorer, (or Internet Explorer) your search has been preserved (see screen 1), and you can launch it either from the Favourites menu or by switching on the Favourites Explorer bar. Note that this preserves the search criteria, not the results, so depending on the latency of the ind~xing, you should always get up-to-date results.