Windows Desktop Search and MSN and Google “integration”

Here’s something fun:

I was reading this guide on Windows Desktop Search (WDS) and how to make it search your intranet. Once the relevant policies are applied and WDS gets restarted, an ‘intranet’ search button appears. The idea is that you can point it to a SharePoint Portal Server that has an index of all of your enterprise’s artifacts. Finally, there is another button called ‘Web’ which of course submits your query to MSN Search.

I manually added the following key to my registry: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\DesktopSearch. Under there, I added ‘PrimaryIntranetSearchScopeUrl’ with a value of ‘http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=$w’. This way I have made Google my ‘intranet’. I can now submit queries to my local machine, MSN Search, and Google from one interface 🙂

Recent Posts

BrainExpanded – Copilot

Happy New Year everyone! I was planning for my next BrainExpanded post to be a…

1 week ago

BrainExpanded – The Timeline

See "BrainExpanded - Introduction" for context on this post. Notes and links Over the years,…

3 weeks ago

BrainExpanded – Introduction

This is the first post, in what I think is going to be a series,…

3 weeks ago

Digital twin follow up

Back in February, I shared the results of some initial experimentation with a digital twin.…

4 weeks ago

Digital Twin (my playground)

I am embarking on a side project that involves memory and multimodal understanding for an…

11 months ago

“This is exactly what LLMs are made for”

I was in Toronto, Canada. I'm on the flight back home now. The trip was…

1 year ago