Some of us now have computers with hard disk space in Terabytes, which implies you probably have a lot of content to store on the computer -- like movies, music, images, documents, presentations, and what not. With so much on your hard disk, to be able to track what you want quickly, installing Desktop Search on your computer only makes sense.

If you happen to use the Windows operating system, you'd be familiar with Windows Desktop Search (WDS), the operating system's indexed desktop search platform. Microsoft yesterday announced the release of an updated "preview version" of Windows Search 4.0, which is the next big thing to happen to the Windows Search platform. This first beta of Windows Search 4.0 is meant to help users find and preview any kind of text, audio, image files, etc, on the computer. Previously called Windows Desktop Search (WDS), Microsoft had initially introduced their version of Desktop Search as MSN Desktop Search, along with the MSN Toolbar suite.

The software giant claims that Windows Search 4.0 is much faster than the search tool included in Windows Vista. This was accomplished, they say, because they have been able to fix most of the bugs that were reported for it while in Vista.

Meanwhile, Windows Search 4.0 is available both as an update to Vista's built-in search engine, as well as an updated version of the XP add-on. You can download the Windows Search 4.0 (beta) application here, and find details about it here.