Windows Desktop Search APIs –Mashups & Web2.0

Chris Butler’s first blog entry after joining the windows desktop search reveals more support for Desktop Search APIs (in beta initially) to do new and cool things with. Chris highlights, using the Add-ins dev guide, you can now write an application that takes the results from Desktop Search and combines it with information from other sources such as online content. This allows you to create new mash-ups of functionality that we haven’t even though of yet. Ooohh, this is very “web 2.0” ;-) One new API set can send queries into the Desktop Search product and get back a list of results to display in your own applications and tools. The same queries that are passed into the Deskbar or Toolbar can be sent in programmatically into the Desktop Search index now. If you have a proprietary data format, you can write an add-in that enables Desktop Search to parse your file format or interface with your data store, and then be able to pass queries through to the index for that data type and display results in another application. Also, in this release we created new interfaces have been created to simplify the process of creating protocol handler based add-ins for new stores. Now, rather than having to tweak a bunch of registry settings and using the command line options of the Desktop Search application, you can use the AddProtocol and AddDefaultUrl methods.This is a great solution for information workers and corporations that deal with specialized files all day long.The potential for exponential business growth as a result of the effects of Web 2.0 comes down to the difference between human-instigated value consumption and computer-instigated value consumption.This makes it closer to reality for possible identification and consumption of value to occur without human intervention as a result of Web 2.0..