Nick White recently announced the Windows Search 4.0 Preview. The description of the Remote Index Discovery seems to be promising.

The first positive improvement after the installation I realized is a ‘Pause’ button at the ‘Indexing options’. A tray icon, for convenient pausing the indexing, as I did know from the early versions of MSN Desktop Search or Microsoft Research’s Stuff I’ve Seen, is not provided.

On the Windows Server 2003 installation, I find a tab at the ‘Advanced Options’ allowing me to add UNC locations. Since I had no Desktop Search running on my server before I am not sure if this is some new feature.

So far, I haven’t found anything about the Remote Index Discovery, yet. However, I will follow up the development of the Desktop Search in the future.