I've now taken a test drive on each of these new (Beta) offerings. Surprisingly, the MSN Desktop Search [1] tool is far better than the Google Desktop Search [2].

Some of the reasons why I am ranking MSN Desktop Search above Google Desktop Search:

• More control/configurability/options in MSN Desktop Search.
• Mre reliable searches. Google's was failing to find most of my documents even after having been installed and indexing my system for a week! For example, I could pick a directory, look for a group of files with a common keyword, search on that keyword in Google desktop, and only get one out of ten files returned in the search. That's horrible! MSN indexes quicker, and finds 100% of the files on my system.
• MSN Desktop Search has better options for refined search queries.
• The search result formatting is more useful in MSN Desktop Search.
• I've noticed no impact on my system performance, and the searches are lightning fast.
• I also prefer the MSN "Deskbar".
• The MSN Desktop Indexing Service a snap to manage, because it gives you more control over what and when it indexes.
• You can monitor indexing status in real-time.

Some caveats of MSN Desktop Search:

• The Indexing Service is apparently not used to index, contrary to intuition. MSN Desktop Search manages to index my system even when the service is stopped and set to Manual.
• If you have MSN Toolbar installed already, uninstall MSN Toolbar before installing MSN Toolbar Beta (which is how you install the bundled MSN Desktop Search).
• If you rename your computer, MSN Desktop Search will fail to work until you reboot your system.