Federated Search, despite its wonky name, is a seriously cool feature of Windows 7. Download a few "connectors" and you can search Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and other web results straight from your desktop.
It's a natural extension of Vista's save-and-tag search functions, which could also be extended to grab parts of the web with some work-arounds. In Windows 7, however, adding a web site or database to your searching powers is simply a matter of installing a connector file—with a .osdx extension—by double-clicking it. Let's take a look at some of the cooler connectors already available for Windows 7 beta users (which, we presume, will still work when Win7 officially launches):
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