Sean's Blog

The MSN Desktop Search application is an evolutionary version of the standard Indexing Service that has been shipping as part of Windows since Windows 2000. They both make use of the same IFilter components to allow third parties to add indexing support for their file formats. One of the standard IFilter components is one that parses html documents. The beta version of MSN Desktop Search included an option to index your web browser history but this feature was removed from the final version due to privacy concerns.

I often find myself searching for a web page that I remember reading a couple of months ago. If I then use Google or MSN to search for the page it can take me a long time to find the same page again since you’re often overwhelmed with other pages containing your search term but rather than being the page you want they’re sales pages.

The ideal would be to perform an indexed search based on some terms you remember reading in the page but limiting the search to only pages you’ve actually visited on the web. In other words if you had a complete copy as opposed to just a small cached subset of every web page you’ve visited then you could use a local desktop search against this complete browser history.

Taking this to the next level in terms of keeping an electronic copy of everything you’ve visited or received including paper copies is the MyLifeBits project. Channel9 also has an interview with a couple of the people involved in the MyLifeBits project.

For details on the application I wrote and to download the application and/or source code take a look at the CodeProject article I wrote.