I found this article quite some time back when I was investigating MSN desktop search for a company I was working for at the time. Due to the branding, etc... they didn't want to implement.

Now that Desktop Search has been released, I have installed it and found it to be quite useful. I thought I would try the shortcuts outlined in Mark's article to see if they work in the current version of Desktop Search. Sure enough they do. If you type:

@sps,http://my-portal/search.aspx?k=$w into your desktop search bar, you can then type "sps search term goes here" and search for something in your intranet portal located at http://my-portal (of course if your portal name is different, you will have to replace it from the example :-) )

@google,

Alan Josephson turned me on to this project by the Patterns & Practices team at Microsoft. I have been a big proponent of the P&P's Application Blocks and Guidance. This is an AWESOME project that will give developers a reference architecture when building SmartClient Applications.

I Love this Stuff :-)

I have used MSn Seach of and on for a while. My only complaint before was the branding of the tool with MSN. From a corporate perspective, this didn't set well with some clients.

Microsoft has released Windows Desktop Search as the corporate version of their desktop search tool. This tool can be pushed out with Group Policy settings, etc. Finally, a desktop search tool I can recommend to clients. It's awesome. You can also configure custom search sources to search your intranet portal, your profile database in SharePoint, etc... too cool.

Windows Desktop Search
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/desktopsearch/enterprise/downloads.mspx#EBB

Administrators Guide
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows/sear ...

Microsoft posted this benchmark test on performance differences between using SQL 2000 vs 2005 and SharePoint Portal Server 2003.

One thing I would note is that they are using 64bit platform for the SQL Server. Due to the performance enhancements in 2005 to take advantage of the 64bit capabilites, I can see how quite a lot of the performance difference is more efficient use of the hardware. Compelling reason to upgrade if you can !

I had installed this way and did some limited testing. i thought it was faster but I had not taken time to do any scientific testing :-)

Steve

Thanks to Dustin for posting This Tip

To enable PDF Searching in your sharepoint environment, there are three things you need to do, two simple and one easy but potentially performance hindering (while the indexes rebuid) best to do that one during a maintenance cycle.

Steve

Thought I'd throw a few comments in here so Steve doesn't hog all the website space.  Who knows, I might post our findings as we explore Sharepoint at the company I work, Clorox (we make more than bleach!)

I have been following this lately. Looks like some interesting stuff. Microsoft is trying to build HAL :-)

<Is that you Dave ?>

<Dave>

<What are you doing Dave ? >

Ever needed to alter the text that is sent back to the client after all of the rendering is done ? The case in this article is to highlight search text in the page output. I needed to do it for this very reason so the article was just what I was looking for...

Ahhhhhh... Google DOES know everything ;-)

Hope it helps someone else out :-)