My good buds on the Windows Search Team have asked me to relay some exciting new information regarding Windows Search 4.0:

Since Windows Search 4.0 (WS4.0) was released to the web on June 3rd, we've seen a good number of downloads, and a number of positive responses from customers who started using it.  Users are telling us that they're seeing better performance and reliability of search after WS4.0 is installed.  As a result, we feel it's time to make WS4.0 available to the broader audience.

In late July WS4.0 will become available for installation off Windows Update. Customers using Windows XP will see WS4.0 available as an Optional update, meaning they can manually install it from update.microsoft.com.  Windows Vista customers will see the update as a recommended update. Depending on the Windows Update settings on your Windows Vista SP1 client, WS4.0 may be installed automatically, updating the search capability in Windows Vista SP1. 

Not everyone will get it on the same day; the release of Windows Search 4.0 will be very gradual.  While every user will be able to install the update off the Windows Update site interactively, the automatic update may not come

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Not necessarily a "Windows Experience" (although it does improve the Windows Experience) - I'm making this post on behalf of the Windows Search Team. Oh and I am really excited for this release.

Today we released the final version of Windows Search 4.0 to Microsoft Download Center. Windows Search 4.0 updates search in Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Home Server. This release comes after a public Windows Search 4.0 Preview, which was a success thanks to great community participation - with around 300,000 downloads.   Since the Preview was released, a number of quality improvements have been made to the product based on feedback provided by the community.

Download: Windows Search 4.0 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (x86)

Download: Windows Search 4.0 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (x64)

More download packages are available on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940157.

So, what's new in this release?

First and foremost: we've introduced some performance and reliability improvements. Queries are faster, as is indexing - how much faster depends on your machine and your data. Improved reliability means that system failures won't get in the way of the indexer and all of your data

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Brandon Paddock, who works on the Windows Shell Team here at Microsoft, wrote a Windows Sidebar Gadget that displays the status of the Windows Search Indexer.

Download the Indexer Status Gadget here.

I don't know about you but I think it's kind of neat being able to see how many files Windows Search has indexed on my PC right from my desktop. For folks giving the Windows Search 4.0 Preview a try, you can enable "Index Now" functionality (which is reflected in the above screenshot).

Brandon Paddock developed this gadget on his own time and isn't officially supported by Microsoft. Brandon also developed the Start++ search add-on for Windows Vista.

We're announcing quite a few new languages available of the Windows Search 4.0 Preview today.

The following languages are available for download for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008:

• Arabic (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Bulgarian
• Chinese - Simplified
• Chinese - Traditional
• Croatian
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (There is no MUI pack for English)
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Greek
• Hebrew (Only for Windows Vista/Windows Server 2008)
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Norwegian - Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian

Please take note that the following languages are available on Windows XP/Windows Server 2003 only with an MUI pack:

• Bulgarian
• Croatian
• Estonian
• Latvian
• Lithuanian
• Romanian
• Serbian - Latin
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Thai
• Ukrainian

Got feedback on the Windows Search 4.0? We've got several places that you can go to leave your feedback:

• For general discussion with Windows Search engineers and team members you can head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For developer discussion, head over to this MSDN Forum.
• For general (no-reply) feedback on Windows Search, you can submit feedback here.

To search for files on my PCs, I use Windows Search - Windows Vista's desktop search feature. I use Windows Search specifically to find photos that I've tagged in Windows Live Photo Gallery or important emails and Word documents. I also rely on saving specific searches that I can go back to later on. Searching and being able to find important files quickly on my PC is very important to me.  And Windows Search allows me to "find my stuff" whenever I need to. Today we get to see a little "preview" of the next step for Windows Search. The Windows Search Team is making available Windows Search 4.0 Preview - a preview of the next version of desktop search for Windows.

Windows Search 4.0 introduces several improvements I'd like to call out making search even better in Windows Vista:

• With Windows Search 4.0, the Windows Search Team has fixed most of the reported bugs causing a majority of distractions users have seen since Windows Vista RTM - many of those bugs were reported by you.
• Great improvements have been made with regards to performance.Even now as Preview, Windows Search 4.0 has query response time about 33%faster than search queries

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