Scoble talks about trust and desktop search engines, but I don't like the way it's presented.

Scoble isn't an objective party, but even so, I think some of his points were directed too much toward other's flaws rather than their own strengths. Here are my answers:

1. Indexing cache or history - Reading the browser cache was a mistake, but why shouldn't I be able to search through my history? It's already built in into IE, so there are no privacy issues there. I often need to find some page that I visited, and the alternative to searching my history is searching Google :-)
2. Sending data back - MSN doesn't phone home if you're not part of customer experiance feedback, but that is the default for MSN DS and you can turn it off easily in both Google DS and MSN DS.
3. Sharing private data between users - It's nice that MSN DS doesn't do it, but a statement such as "Not sure about others." bring us back to the good ole days of MS FUD. As far as I know, GDS doesn't expose anything that you can't reach as your user, it just make it so much easier to find those things.
4. Index obfuscation - say what? I'm not sure how this is relevant, and I certainly didn't see an option in MSN DS to point it to another user index file and use that one, not even as admin. Even so, I can't think of many instances where this would be needed. And if so, simply running the software as that user would give me what I want.
5. Automatic downloads - I agree that GDS shoudln't auto install without asking, but can you really tell me that a security bug in MSN DS wouldn't be on Windows Update (In other words, it would auto-install on MS' recommended settings.) What GDS is doing wrong is that there should be an option (and yes, it should be on by default).

When all is said and done, I'm still using MSN DS rather than GDS because of the much slicker interface.

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