Seeking a More Intuitive Search Tool

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, March 27, 2005; Page F07

The file-search tool in Windows XP is a dog, and not just metaphorically -- a little animated puppy appears on screen to indicate your query's status by wagging its tail, panting, scratching itself and other actions.

If only Microsoft's programmers had put such effort into the rest of this software! Its searches run painfully slowly and routinely yield masses of unrelated files.

A gaggle of contenders has recently put forth replacements for Microsoft's search. Some are popular Web portals -- Ask Jeeves, Google and Yahoo. Some are small, obscure developers -- Copernic and Blinkx. One's a division of Microsoft