Remove the butterfly image from MSN Desktop Search Taskbar

When MSN Desktop Search sits on the Taskbar, there’s one niggling annoyance that won’t go away. The butterfly image (which Microsoft insiders call a jellybean because it’s shaped like one) takes up precious Taskbar space, as does the small arrow to the right of it2. They become a problem when you run a lot of programs at the same time. With the jellybean there, because there’s less space on the Taskbar, you won’t be able to see the tiles of all the programs that are currently running.

There’s a simple Registry hack that will kill the jellybean and arrow, but still gives you the features of search. First, run the Registry Editor and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MSN Apps\DB. Create a new DWORD value called Buttons and give it a value of 1. Exit the Registry.

Now, take MSN Desktop Search away from the Taskbar by right-clicking the Taskbar, choosing Properties, and removing the checkmark from MSN Deskbar. Then, right-click the Taskbar again, choose Properties, and put a checkmark next to MSN Deskbar. MSN Desktop Search will appear again on the Taskbar, this time without the jellybean.

In Out-Google Google with MSN Desktop Search, Oreilly argues why MSN Desktop Search is much superior to Google Desktop. MSN Desktop Search does a far better job of finding email and files on your computer because it hooks directly into Windows, Outlook, Outlook Express, and Microsoft Office and lets you search in ways you can’t with the Google Desktop. And it does more than that as well; once you find files or email, you can move them, delete them, copy them, respond to them—pretty much anything Windows lets you do. Google Desktop merely lets you view them.

The true power of the program comes not in its basic searches but in the MSN search syntax you can use. The syntax has been explicitly created to help you search through documents on your PC. So, unlike with the Google Desktop, you’ll be able to search inside specific folders. And you can also search by the author of a document, by the sender and recipient of email, and so on. And, of course, it can handle Boolean searches, so you can use OR, AND, wildcards, and so on.

Let’s say you want to find all email that was sent to you from Joe Metz, that had attachments, and that contained the word budget. You’d issue this search:

  kind:email from:Joe Metz has:attachment budget

If you want to find every PowerPoint presentation in the Money folder with the word ROI in it, issue this search:

  kind:presentation folder:Money ROI