15 ms·

Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

182 points by weare138 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Windows 10 search is a weird beast anyways. Sometimes it finds things, sometimes it doesn’t. On my work machines it often doesn’t even find items from the start menu.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  Look at how much the results change based on small changes to the input. Type three letters in a name and get a lot of things that aren't what you want. Type the fourth letter and the exact thing you're looking for jumps to the top. But if you add the fifth letter it goes away. I feel like it's trying to be too clever or, because it assumes the input is coming from voice recognition, it doesn't trust that what you typed is actually what you "said". So instead of compensating for potentially mistyped queries it searches for results that are nearby in audible space.
  - tanseydavid 7y ago
    Thanks to both of you for mentioning this. Every time I encounter this strange behavior in WIN10 -- I am so dumbstruck by it each time it still feels like it must have been a "glitch-in-the-matrix". I mean, because no one would really release software like that, would they? At least not a multi-billion software behemoth like MS? Right? </sarc>
    - desc 7y ago
      I know why this happens. It happens because someone doesn't understand that search rankings vs. queries have to have a 'smooth' solution, and thinks they can tweak a few weightings here and there to get the results they think are 'correct' for the very specific cases they have in mind, without realising that this has a knock-on effect on the entire scoring space and you get odd singularities and stuff popping up as a result. The people in question should not be touching anything even distantly related to a computer in any professional context.
      - mattmanser 7y ago
        I try not to say things like that anymore, you've never met the person and have no idea of the context or their skills. Could be that they were forced to change it at the 11th hour just before Windows 10 was being demo'd and it was never changed back. Could be a committee decision. Could be the programmer hated the surveillance installed by MS and so deliberately made the search bad.
        desc 7y ago
        The 'someone' in question probably wasn't the engineer. I'd bet the engineer was listening to the 'someone' saying things like 'why don't you just' or 'it just needs to do this', or other things including the word 'just'. I'd bet the engineer tried to explain the realities of how this stuff works, to 'someone' who's job didn't involve understanding what they were asking for, and reacted by demanding with the word 'just' instead of pretending to ask.
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        It goes far beyond weightings, things will be completely missing with no reason.
  - irascible 7y ago
    Yeah it really is insane. I have folders where I will be looking at the file and no search expression will show it. It has been like that for a while. Stunningly bad.
  - macleginn 7y ago
    Windows is not the only culprit here: https://imgur.com/gallery/GlmEheS https://imgur.com/gallery/GlmEheS
- chairmanwow1 7y ago
  Honesty, this is incredible that such a basic feature is a tossup. To me these small, maddening anti-features that one by one, bring you to the edge of the abyss are exactly the reason I will never return to Windows. My Mac just works. Occasionally something will freeze, but that’s like 5 times in 5 years. With my windows machine weekly, hell, even daily things would slow to a crawl, crash, fail etc. I don’t understand why people put themselves through it.
  - rado 7y ago
    The Mac gets a lot of flak and macOS is indeed riddled with bugs, but there can be no comparison to the dumpster fire that is Windows.
Zanni 7y ago
Of all the things I hate about Windows, unified search is the worst. If I want to search the web, I'll search the web--there's an app for that, the browser. Let me just search my hard drive, please. I didn't experience this bug, but if I had, I'd be furious that I couldn't search my own local files without somehow getting an internet service involved.
- taeric 7y ago
  Curious. This is also one of the touted nice things on chrome books, right? I think I can agree. But the push by all browsers seems to be more search. Not less.
- maest 7y ago
  I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable online search. There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-windows-10-search-is-giving-blank-results/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi... Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0 and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0 However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.
  - eternalny1 7y ago
    ShutUp10 lets you turn this on/off easily with a toggle, as with MANY other "features" of Windows 10 like all the telemetry: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
    - kwhitefoot 7y ago
      Thank you!
  - 7y ago
lentil_soup 7y ago
I don't understand. I don't want my start menu to search my files or the internet or be smart in any way, I just want it to show my installed programs or apps or whatever you want to call them. If I want to search my files I have a program for that, if I want to search the internet I open my browser. Why do we have to over complicate things! Who asked for this?
- lsd5you 7y ago
  Likely a rhetorical question, but they're trying trying to become the place where people go to look for things ... since apparently there is a massive amount of value (at least enough to risk the windows user experience) in controlling that entry point into search.
- r00fus 7y ago
  The same reason IE was integrated into the OS in 1998. To embrace, extend & extinguish.
  - colejohnson66 7y ago
    What are they embracing so they can extinguish in this instance?
    - dntbnmpls 7y ago
      The IE integration with Windows was to extinguish Netscape Navigator. So I'm guessing this move is probably to destroy chrome and indirectly google search. Microsoft used their OS monopoly to destroy Netscape. Not sure if it will work today since they don't dominate the smartphone space.
      - xkemp 7y ago
        Or, maybe, document/file search is a pretty useful and commonly expected feature for a desktop operating system? And extending it to online search is an entirely natural next step? Even if this were a plot against Google, it would simply be bog-standard competition. It has absolutely none of the characteristics of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
pacifika 7y ago
Microsoft doesn’t build Windows with the consumer as the priority. Microsoft first, then big business, then advertisers. I used to find this aggravating but it’s better to accept it and move on.
- craftinator 7y ago
  To me, Microsoft's PR message has always amounted to "Windows users are either too busy, dumb, disorganized, impatient, or unfamiliar with their systems to know how to do things, so we try to think for them." It was amazing how much more productive and powerful I felt switching to Linux. Like, I could suddenly FIX problems without having to install some sketchy .exe or driver. Can't understand why people stick with Windows when they have other options.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    > Can't understand why people stick with Windows when they have other options. Gaming, support, decades of technical debt, and familiar user interfaces/workflows for non-technical users.
    - craftinator 7y ago
      Gaming: getting a lot better on Linux, at an increasing rate. Steam has put a lot of work into making games available cross platform and for me, everything has "just worked" for the last two years or so. Support: I've never had Windows support be successful. The helpers, wizzards, and online support has misdiagnosed or been unable to fix every issue I've had. For Linux, there are massive, friendly, knowledgeable communities, thorough documentation, and if all else fails, Stack Overflow. Technical debt: I can't think of a Windows application I needed that hasn't had a similar FOSS application (if that was what you meant) User interfaces: other than the Windows Start Menu, vanilla Ubuntu seems pretty familiar and intuitive coming from Windows, from what I remember when I switched. Of course this is mostly subjective! But I think that Linux had so many years of clunkiness that it has a technical stigma to the average windows user. I've had friends and relatives switch recently after getting fed up by "Windows is now updating your PC at a very inconvenient time, for 3 hours", and overall have been happy with the switch.
pratio 7y ago
The state of this webpage and most i visit on a daily basis makes me sad. Can’t just open a page and read stuff anymore. There’s a vide being loaded and before that finishes the cookie popup comes up.
- larkeith 7y ago
  Disabling Javascript by default avoids most of this, though it breaks some sites.
  - Moru 7y ago
    uBlock has some cookie popup removers
    - grenoire 7y ago
      Then the website ends up not scrolling or thinks that it has a modal that needs closing; ended up opting out of that after a couple months of annoyance.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I go one step further and disable CSS by default too. More often than not, disabling CSS improves webpages.
    - larkeith 7y ago
      I'll have to try that out, somehow I'd not considered that.
Multicomp 7y ago
I got multiple people to install voidtools everything and open shell as a result of this bad update. I asked them after we applied the patch if they wanted me to revert the changes, but they refused, stating that having instant local only search and a normal start menu was a dream come true. That is beside the point that if Microsoft can no longer even produce a wimp interface without third-party software needed to get us back to the baseline of Windows 7, that does not bode well for them.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Search everything is great. It does exactly what it says it does and is super fast.
- nocturnial 7y ago
  I also use O&O shutup. It's portable and needs to be run only once and perhaps after a windows update. Lately, the windows updates doesn't seem to alter the changes I made using shutup. It's a convenience tool. If you look up everything you can do it all manually.
  - Shank 7y ago
    Everything is a search engine, not at all related to O&O shutup.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - nocturnial 7y ago
      I never mentioned everything, I never said shutup was a search engine.. Not everything in this thread is related to "everything", some things are related to windows dailing home to ms hq. dang: I'm done with this bullshit, it's ok to delete my account.
      - BubRoss 7y ago
crispinb 7y ago
Every time one of the many irritations I have with Linux makes me consider reinstalling Windows to give it another try, this kind of thing is just what comes to mind and stops me.
- boudin 7y ago
  In my opinion, there's issues with all OS, but Linux is the only one that is documented enough, can be customized enough and as enough of an ecosystem to fix my problems or at least find workarounds. With Windows or Macos the only solution is too often to live with the ecosystem as thought by Apple or Microsoft, liking it or not, which I just can't stand personnally...
tantalor 7y ago
> Windows 10 may now be essential I think you can stop reading right there.
basicplus2 7y ago
Does this mean that microsoft could be keeping copies of the meta data of every file on every windows computer on their servers and doing the search there?
- craftinator 7y ago
  I had the same thought. Bit of a security risk there, not to mention being incredibly invasive.
- xkemp 7y ago
  Well, yes, they obviously can as in could, as could any other OS. This incident doesn't actually show any local files being sent to MS, however. Online search can be disable with a registry entry, which proves that the online service is not necessary for searching local files. It's far more likely that a connection error for the bing search is just triggering some bug that then prevents local results from being shown.
- NikkiA 7y ago
  Why not? that's how google desktop search used to work.
makecheck 7y ago
The search behaves “as if” it’s using randomly-ordered keys in a random source dictionary, and it’s maddening. If I type what seems to be the same 3 letters a few times in a row, the result is always different: one time it acts like the app isn’t even installed, another time it finds the app (first choice), another time it finds some other random sub-component instead of the app with a weird file extension. Oh, and my favorite: sometimes it finds multiple things but only after a delay, meaning that just as I hit Enter the top hit changes and I end up opening something entirely unintentional (bonus points if the mistaken choice is something that takes longer to launch, freezing the machine). They need: (1) stability in the UI (never mess with something once it is highlighted), and (2) stability in the lookup (the same input produces the same set in the same order, every single time or it’s useless).
- SturgeonsLaw 7y ago
  If anyone from Microsoft happens to be reading this thread, please read the above comment, then re-read it. It's a spot-on description of the problems and solutions for Windows search. Edit: and just to expand on a point the commenter made, the results would be more valuable if it prioritised in an order like this: 1) Something the user has pinned 2) Something the user has launched a bunch of times 3) The shortcut leads to an .exe that's likely to be the main program file 4) Anything else
  - BubRoss 7y ago
    Absolutely - the file system also has attributes like atime - the last accessed time of a file. It isn't as granular on windows, but a search could still prioritize files by when they were last read.
  - thebruce87m 7y ago
    5. Never anything on the web
    - steverb 7y ago
      There's a registry setting to turn that off thank God. I LIKE Windows 10, but that particular "feature" is a no go for me.
yummypaint 7y ago
To have search work viably as a menu it has to repeatable, which generally involves delivering desired results. More anti-user hubris from microsoft.
cosmojg 7y ago
What idiot uses proprietary software with the expectation of privacy? Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is pretty up front about their extensive use of telemetry. If you're looking for an operating system which isn't expressly built to profit off of you and your data, try a Linux or BSD distribution.
- rationalfaith 7y ago
  THIS. These reporters are turning into gossip websites. No facts, just speculations and reacting dramatically to their self-created speculations.
- Randor 7y ago
  Well, I've worked on some defense projects and navigation software for billion-dollar hardware. While at Microsoft I also worked on two system services that shipped with Windows 10. Even I expect a certain amount of privacy when working on my personal workstations. Some of my work (team-effort intellectual property) produced while living in New York was sold to Microsoft for 24 million dollars around 2012. Seems to me that it would make research and development uncomfortable for start-ups. Imagine having the ability to query all of the search terms performed on workstations for any R&D group in the world.
rationalfaith 7y ago
At this point these "tech-news" websites are turning into gossip columns. Please fact check before you start stirring more unfounded drama. Simple humans errors... don't blow them up into more conspiracies.
aj7 7y ago
About a year ago, I switched from a Windows 10 quad-core Xeon system to an iMac Pro. The single greatest performance enhancement, among many, is the speed and accuracy of the macOS search.
- pdimitar 7y ago
  Seconded. Not to mention how amazingly fast the iMac Pro is in general. Still thinking of buying Alfred but I'm undecided. Have you tried it?
desc 7y ago
Can't say I ran into this particular bug, but I tend not to trust the search on Windows much anyway. I myself have implemented better text/prefix matching and ranking using a very simple SQLite database schema, on a far larger dataset than 'the local machine', yet Microsoft repeatedly fail at a task which should succumb easily even to brute-force approaches. They don't get to claim that it's a harder problem than indexing a hard disk without first explaining why they think they should retain the use of their fingers for continuing to send search terms over a network after I, as the owner of the hardware and 'owner' of the OS instance have made a concerted effort to turn that shit off.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  Jeffrey Snover[1] likes to say that "Microsoft is incapable of sustained error", yet they've been incapable of building a good search for at least 15-20 years that I've experienced. Bing search is no competitor to Google, Explorer filesystem search is slow and untrustworthy, the search which integrates desktops to Windows server indexing of fileshares is slow and untrustworthy, on-premises SharePoint search has never worked well for finding documents for me, Start Menu search is the worst at matching plain text strings in short names year after year, Windows version after Windows version, local Outlook Search wasn't great, Outlook search backed by Exchange isn't great, and it goes easily back to Joel on Software's blog post[2] of 2004 where he says > Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973. That's still what I want, and still what they don't do. [1] PowerShell originator, now "Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management Group" at Microsoft. [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
  - jiggawatts 7y ago
    Here's the thing: I've built, back in 2005, a full-text search for 60 GB of small-text data that would typically return results in under 15ms. This was using 100% Microsoft-native technology, like C# and SQL. How much data does the Start Menu search have to index, total? A few 100KB? Something like that. This is assuming a fresh install, no documents, no third party apps. A modern CPU can simply brute force through that amount of data and perform nearly arbitrary subtext matching, without any fancy indexing techniques, in something like a handful of microseconds. Even in an absolute worst-case of cross-process pointer chasing out into uncached main memory, you're talking a few tens of milliseconds, max. Yet, a fresh install of any version of Windows, including Server editions, simply flat out fails to find control panel items or shortcuts even if their names are typed exactly. Many hours later it'll find some of them, not necessarily all. Days later, perhaps it'll reach a 100% match, but that's certainly not guaranteed. For me, often having to use freshly installed Windows VMs, I see a nearly 100% failure rate for this component. It's just absurd that this passed QA.
s_T_e_v_o 7y ago
If I need to search for something outside my policy limited range, I use explorer++. It will find it, and it will allow you to have tabs and to store favorites.
mreome 7y ago
I just wish I could get search to stop returning applications I uninstalled months ago (and yes I've tried deleting and rebuilding the index).
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  Perhaps there's a shortcut in Quick Launch? (A Windows 95 feature they decided to get rid of but never quite managed to completely remove.)
nmfisher 7y ago
It's amusing (and infuriating) that file search - IMO, one of the most important features for a desktop O/S - has been utterly broken in Windows since Vista. On Windows 10, half the time it just hangs with "Searching files", displaying zero results. The other half, search simply says "Nothing found", even when I know there is a match. I just tested it with %USERPROFILE%/.docker - open up File Explorer and search for ConfigVersion that appears in config.json. Nada. I have to resort to cygwin/grep any time I want a search that actually works. I never had this problem pre-Vista. I don't know how they managed to go backwards on such a fundamental feature.
- 0x8BADF00D 7y ago
  It’s relatively easy to implement search - you need only minimize the Levenshtein distance between the search string and the file name string. The difficult part is actually indexing all file names and their string contents on the system. Grep is a different tool, mainly using regular expressions to match strings within files and I don’t think it is feasible to be continually loading the contents of all strings contained in all files into memory to perform fuzzy string matching.
  - badsectoracula 7y ago
    I was always very skeptical about the need for search indexing for local files - how often do you search for stuff to need indexing in the first place? I have a ton of files, certainly more than the average Windows user and i do search for things often enough (at least once a day). To search i use Total Commander (allows for both wildcard/regex searches, archive searches, content search with a bunch of options) which doesn't use indexing at all and search speed was never something i had as a problem (and in general i hate waiting for the computer to do stuff). In what workflows is search needed so often and for so many files that it necessitates indexing? Even back when i first encountered it (in Vista - AFAIK it existed in XP and before but it wasn't enabled by default) i thought it was a waste of resources and unnecessary complexity.
    - ptidhomme 7y ago
rkagerer 7y ago
I've used FileLocator Pro as my Explorer CTRL+F replacement for years, and I love it. Fast, doesn't rely on fragile indexing, and finds stuff Microsoft always seems to miss.
ReptileMan 7y ago
Honestly for non indexed search VoidTools everything is leaps and bounds before windows search. It searches directly in the NTFS dictionaries and is blazing fast.
kwhitefoot 7y ago
Frustration with Windows Start menu search drove me to install Keypirinha: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/ Specifically: I type ope and the top of the list is Skype, then the Opera folder, then Office. When I add an r then About Your PC is at the top. then opera.pak, and at last Opera. But even if I type Opera the hit I expect is still not at the top of the list. With Keypirinha it remembers which one I choose and promotes it to the top. And that was before Search stopped working. If I didn't need SQL Server and Visual Studio for the work I do I would not have Windows on any of my own hardware.
jimnotgym 7y ago
I have an easier fix than most people on here. I would like the start menu search to be confined to the programs installed on the computer. To search settings make me click the 'cog' first. To search for files there is Explorer, which is already better at the job. To search the web I will use Firefox to access a search engine. Wouldn't that be simpler?
- Noumenon72 7y ago
  Wow, no. I have no idea what folder a lot of my files are in, because I can find them with Search. And that extra click before accessing settings would be a huge downgrade for me. I am a fan of Windows search, it's one of the biggest improvements to usability they've ever made. Even if it worked better in Windows 7.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
A good search app is called "Search Everything" :)
- pedro2 7y ago
  You assume everyone has permission to install software :)
mbeex 7y ago
The only things I'm searching this way are related to Windows' own ambiguities and opaqueness. For example, something like classic 'Control Panel' (not quite true, 'bookmarked' it after a while) or special setting menues. Most of these issues are caused by the dual UI. All other things - in particular file search - are much more comfortable with Total Commander, a software providing a sophisticated consistent interface for more than 20 years now, superseding any Windows versions internal abilities easily (including the whole explorer functionality).
awiesenhofer 7y ago
I gave up on windows builtin search a long time ago because its so frustrating - Wox launcher and especially Everything Search is my substitute of choice. Its also incredibly fast! Edit, Links: http://www.wox.one http://www.wox.one https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com
- worble 7y ago
  Just a note - looking at Wox, the official repo seems to be unmaintained, there's appears to be an active fork here however: https://github.com/jjw24/Wox/ https://github.com/jjw24/Wox/
cherrera303 7y ago
I quit using Windows search a long long time ago but I have to admit that it worked better in the WinXP days. Currently using SwiftSearch with very fast results, as it reads directly from the NTFS MFT. No databases, no indexing, no background processes or services. There's also UltraSearch that works with the same idea but is more polished.
BubRoss 7y ago
If you want to see an example of what file search could be like, use the program 'everything'. I have no idea how microsoft creates something so terrible in the first place, let one leaves it that way.
bensonn 7y ago
My search stopped working months ago, typing anything blanked out whole the Start menu. I figured Windows was punishing me for turning Cortana off in the settings. At some point in the last few weeks a Windows update fixed my search. I agree with a lot of posters- I won't use Windows search. It doesn't do what I want or need, and does not function how I expect. I had never heard of Everything but just downloaded it and tried it. It is fast! I typed in YYYY-MM-DD for a few different dates. I have never used OneDrive, do not want to use OneDrive and wish I could uninstall OneDrive. OneDrive creates ~10 new files every day. The broken (now fixed but still stupid) search is just a symptom of a bloated quantity-over-quality, walled-garden, rented-not-owned, OSaaS.
thrower123 7y ago
Even the most insane Start menu shouldn't have enough items that you couldn't just put all the items it contains in an in-memory list and do a dumb startsWith search, and be lightning fast and more reliable than whatever insanity it is doing out of the box these days.
asdfpoiu10 7y ago
Anyone catch the IP or know the URL search phones home to? I suspect I would not be the only one who would want to pi-hole this.
iamAtom 7y ago
Recently my respect to apple is growing more and more because of issues like this. Apple is always criticised for lack of innovations compared to its competitors but their attention to smaller details and ensuring their products just "work" proved to be more valuable to customers than dozens of broken features. Edit: Of course there are some exceptions like apple maps
dekalbcountyman 7y ago
Hey does this effect LTSC? Like, I read the article and looked at the comments and Search works fine and great for me, always have Been a macOS user since the start of my career, but I have been enjoying Windows 10 LTSC
jammygit 7y ago
“we all found out that our local search boxes are somehow dependent on some service working at Microsoft.” She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum ‘Pinocchio score’ for a lack of trust. I miss Ubuntu (minus their amazon scandal...)
jmc5788 7y ago
Classic Shell has continued to make Windows 8/10 far more functional, IMO. The start menu wasn’t broken, and simple is good if you ask me. http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/

182 points by weare138 7y ago

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Windows 10 search is a weird beast anyways. Sometimes it finds things, sometimes it doesn’t. On my work machines it often doesn’t even find items from the start menu.

whoopdedo 7y ago
Look at how much the results change based on small changes to the input. Type three letters in a name and get a lot of things that aren't what you want. Type the fourth letter and the exact thing you're looking for jumps to the top. But if you add the fifth letter it goes away. I feel like it's trying to be too clever or, because it assumes the input is coming from voice recognition, it doesn't trust that what you typed is actually what you "said". So instead of compensating for potentially mistyped queries it searches for results that are nearby in audible space.
- tanseydavid 7y ago
  Thanks to both of you for mentioning this. Every time I encounter this strange behavior in WIN10 -- I am so dumbstruck by it each time it still feels like it must have been a "glitch-in-the-matrix". I mean, because no one would really release software like that, would they? At least not a multi-billion software behemoth like MS? Right? </sarc>
  - desc 7y ago
    I know why this happens. It happens because someone doesn't understand that search rankings vs. queries have to have a 'smooth' solution, and thinks they can tweak a few weightings here and there to get the results they think are 'correct' for the very specific cases they have in mind, without realising that this has a knock-on effect on the entire scoring space and you get odd singularities and stuff popping up as a result. The people in question should not be touching anything even distantly related to a computer in any professional context.
    - mattmanser 7y ago
      I try not to say things like that anymore, you've never met the person and have no idea of the context or their skills. Could be that they were forced to change it at the 11th hour just before Windows 10 was being demo'd and it was never changed back. Could be a committee decision. Could be the programmer hated the surveillance installed by MS and so deliberately made the search bad.
      - desc 7y ago
        The 'someone' in question probably wasn't the engineer. I'd bet the engineer was listening to the 'someone' saying things like 'why don't you just' or 'it just needs to do this', or other things including the word 'just'. I'd bet the engineer tried to explain the realities of how this stuff works, to 'someone' who's job didn't involve understanding what they were asking for, and reacted by demanding with the word 'just' instead of pretending to ask.
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      It goes far beyond weightings, things will be completely missing with no reason.
- irascible 7y ago
  Yeah it really is insane. I have folders where I will be looking at the file and no search expression will show it. It has been like that for a while. Stunningly bad.
- macleginn 7y ago
  Windows is not the only culprit here: https://imgur.com/gallery/GlmEheS https://imgur.com/gallery/GlmEheS
chairmanwow1 7y ago
Honesty, this is incredible that such a basic feature is a tossup. To me these small, maddening anti-features that one by one, bring you to the edge of the abyss are exactly the reason I will never return to Windows. My Mac just works. Occasionally something will freeze, but that’s like 5 times in 5 years. With my windows machine weekly, hell, even daily things would slow to a crawl, crash, fail etc. I don’t understand why people put themselves through it.
- rado 7y ago
  The Mac gets a lot of flak and macOS is indeed riddled with bugs, but there can be no comparison to the dumpster fire that is Windows.

Zanni 7y ago

Of all the things I hate about Windows, unified search is the worst. If I want to search the web, I'll search the web--there's an app for that, the browser. Let me just search my hard drive, please. I didn't experience this bug, but if I had, I'd be furious that I couldn't search my own local files without somehow getting an internet service involved.

taeric 7y ago
Curious. This is also one of the touted nice things on chrome books, right? I think I can agree. But the push by all browsers seems to be more search. Not less.
maest 7y ago
I believe there is a way to disable bing search by setting some flags in the windows registry. I was affected by this bug, and the way to fix it was to disable online search. There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg: https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-windows-10-search-is-giving-blank-results/ https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi... Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0 and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0 However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.
- eternalny1 7y ago
  ShutUp10 lets you turn this on/off easily with a toggle, as with MANY other "features" of Windows 10 like all the telemetry: https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
  - kwhitefoot 7y ago
    Thank you!
- 7y ago

lentil_soup 7y ago

I don't understand. I don't want my start menu to search my files or the internet or be smart in any way, I just want it to show my installed programs or apps or whatever you want to call them. If I want to search my files I have a program for that, if I want to search the internet I open my browser. Why do we have to over complicate things! Who asked for this?

lsd5you 7y ago
Likely a rhetorical question, but they're trying trying to become the place where people go to look for things ... since apparently there is a massive amount of value (at least enough to risk the windows user experience) in controlling that entry point into search.
r00fus 7y ago
The same reason IE was integrated into the OS in 1998. To embrace, extend & extinguish.
- colejohnson66 7y ago
  What are they embracing so they can extinguish in this instance?
  - dntbnmpls 7y ago
    The IE integration with Windows was to extinguish Netscape Navigator. So I'm guessing this move is probably to destroy chrome and indirectly google search. Microsoft used their OS monopoly to destroy Netscape. Not sure if it will work today since they don't dominate the smartphone space.
    - xkemp 7y ago
      Or, maybe, document/file search is a pretty useful and commonly expected feature for a desktop operating system? And extending it to online search is an entirely natural next step? Even if this were a plot against Google, it would simply be bog-standard competition. It has absolutely none of the characteristics of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".

pacifika 7y ago

Microsoft doesn’t build Windows with the consumer as the priority. Microsoft first, then big business, then advertisers. I used to find this aggravating but it’s better to accept it and move on.

craftinator 7y ago
To me, Microsoft's PR message has always amounted to "Windows users are either too busy, dumb, disorganized, impatient, or unfamiliar with their systems to know how to do things, so we try to think for them." It was amazing how much more productive and powerful I felt switching to Linux. Like, I could suddenly FIX problems without having to install some sketchy .exe or driver. Can't understand why people stick with Windows when they have other options.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  > Can't understand why people stick with Windows when they have other options. Gaming, support, decades of technical debt, and familiar user interfaces/workflows for non-technical users.
  - craftinator 7y ago
    Gaming: getting a lot better on Linux, at an increasing rate. Steam has put a lot of work into making games available cross platform and for me, everything has "just worked" for the last two years or so. Support: I've never had Windows support be successful. The helpers, wizzards, and online support has misdiagnosed or been unable to fix every issue I've had. For Linux, there are massive, friendly, knowledgeable communities, thorough documentation, and if all else fails, Stack Overflow. Technical debt: I can't think of a Windows application I needed that hasn't had a similar FOSS application (if that was what you meant) User interfaces: other than the Windows Start Menu, vanilla Ubuntu seems pretty familiar and intuitive coming from Windows, from what I remember when I switched. Of course this is mostly subjective! But I think that Linux had so many years of clunkiness that it has a technical stigma to the average windows user. I've had friends and relatives switch recently after getting fed up by "Windows is now updating your PC at a very inconvenient time, for 3 hours", and overall have been happy with the switch.

pratio 7y ago

The state of this webpage and most i visit on a daily basis makes me sad. Can’t just open a page and read stuff anymore. There’s a vide being loaded and before that finishes the cookie popup comes up.

larkeith 7y ago
Disabling Javascript by default avoids most of this, though it breaks some sites.
- Moru 7y ago
  uBlock has some cookie popup removers
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Then the website ends up not scrolling or thinks that it has a modal that needs closing; ended up opting out of that after a couple months of annoyance.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I go one step further and disable CSS by default too. More often than not, disabling CSS improves webpages.
  - larkeith 7y ago
    I'll have to try that out, somehow I'd not considered that.

Multicomp 7y ago

I got multiple people to install voidtools everything and open shell as a result of this bad update. I asked them after we applied the patch if they wanted me to revert the changes, but they refused, stating that having instant local only search and a normal start menu was a dream come true. That is beside the point that if Microsoft can no longer even produce a wimp interface without third-party software needed to get us back to the baseline of Windows 7, that does not bode well for them.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Search everything is great. It does exactly what it says it does and is super fast.
nocturnial 7y ago
I also use O&O shutup. It's portable and needs to be run only once and perhaps after a windows update. Lately, the windows updates doesn't seem to alter the changes I made using shutup. It's a convenience tool. If you look up everything you can do it all manually.
- Shank 7y ago
  Everything is a search engine, not at all related to O&O shutup.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - nocturnial 7y ago
    I never mentioned everything, I never said shutup was a search engine.. Not everything in this thread is related to "everything", some things are related to windows dailing home to ms hq. dang: I'm done with this bullshit, it's ok to delete my account.
    - BubRoss 7y ago

crispinb 7y ago

Every time one of the many irritations I have with Linux makes me consider reinstalling Windows to give it another try, this kind of thing is just what comes to mind and stops me.

boudin 7y ago
In my opinion, there's issues with all OS, but Linux is the only one that is documented enough, can be customized enough and as enough of an ecosystem to fix my problems or at least find workarounds. With Windows or Macos the only solution is too often to live with the ecosystem as thought by Apple or Microsoft, liking it or not, which I just can't stand personnally...

tantalor 7y ago

> Windows 10 may now be essential I think you can stop reading right there.

basicplus2 7y ago

Does this mean that microsoft could be keeping copies of the meta data of every file on every windows computer on their servers and doing the search there?

craftinator 7y ago
I had the same thought. Bit of a security risk there, not to mention being incredibly invasive.
xkemp 7y ago
Well, yes, they obviously can as in could, as could any other OS. This incident doesn't actually show any local files being sent to MS, however. Online search can be disable with a registry entry, which proves that the online service is not necessary for searching local files. It's far more likely that a connection error for the bing search is just triggering some bug that then prevents local results from being shown.
NikkiA 7y ago
Why not? that's how google desktop search used to work.

makecheck 7y ago

The search behaves “as if” it’s using randomly-ordered keys in a random source dictionary, and it’s maddening. If I type what seems to be the same 3 letters a few times in a row, the result is always different: one time it acts like the app isn’t even installed, another time it finds the app (first choice), another time it finds some other random sub-component instead of the app with a weird file extension. Oh, and my favorite: sometimes it finds multiple things but only after a delay, meaning that just as I hit Enter the top hit changes and I end up opening something entirely unintentional (bonus points if the mistaken choice is something that takes longer to launch, freezing the machine). They need: (1) stability in the UI (never mess with something once it is highlighted), and (2) stability in the lookup (the same input produces the same set in the same order, every single time or it’s useless).

SturgeonsLaw 7y ago
If anyone from Microsoft happens to be reading this thread, please read the above comment, then re-read it. It's a spot-on description of the problems and solutions for Windows search. Edit: and just to expand on a point the commenter made, the results would be more valuable if it prioritised in an order like this: 1) Something the user has pinned 2) Something the user has launched a bunch of times 3) The shortcut leads to an .exe that's likely to be the main program file 4) Anything else
- BubRoss 7y ago
  Absolutely - the file system also has attributes like atime - the last accessed time of a file. It isn't as granular on windows, but a search could still prioritize files by when they were last read.
- thebruce87m 7y ago
  5. Never anything on the web
  - steverb 7y ago
    There's a registry setting to turn that off thank God. I LIKE Windows 10, but that particular "feature" is a no go for me.

yummypaint 7y ago

To have search work viably as a menu it has to repeatable, which generally involves delivering desired results. More anti-user hubris from microsoft.

cosmojg 7y ago

What idiot uses proprietary software with the expectation of privacy? Not to mention the fact that Microsoft is pretty up front about their extensive use of telemetry. If you're looking for an operating system which isn't expressly built to profit off of you and your data, try a Linux or BSD distribution.

rationalfaith 7y ago
THIS. These reporters are turning into gossip websites. No facts, just speculations and reacting dramatically to their self-created speculations.
Randor 7y ago
Well, I've worked on some defense projects and navigation software for billion-dollar hardware. While at Microsoft I also worked on two system services that shipped with Windows 10. Even I expect a certain amount of privacy when working on my personal workstations. Some of my work (team-effort intellectual property) produced while living in New York was sold to Microsoft for 24 million dollars around 2012. Seems to me that it would make research and development uncomfortable for start-ups. Imagine having the ability to query all of the search terms performed on workstations for any R&D group in the world.

rationalfaith 7y ago

At this point these "tech-news" websites are turning into gossip columns. Please fact check before you start stirring more unfounded drama. Simple humans errors... don't blow them up into more conspiracies.

aj7 7y ago

About a year ago, I switched from a Windows 10 quad-core Xeon system to an iMac Pro. The single greatest performance enhancement, among many, is the speed and accuracy of the macOS search.

pdimitar 7y ago
Seconded. Not to mention how amazingly fast the iMac Pro is in general. Still thinking of buying Alfred but I'm undecided. Have you tried it?

desc 7y ago

Can't say I ran into this particular bug, but I tend not to trust the search on Windows much anyway. I myself have implemented better text/prefix matching and ranking using a very simple SQLite database schema, on a far larger dataset than 'the local machine', yet Microsoft repeatedly fail at a task which should succumb easily even to brute-force approaches. They don't get to claim that it's a harder problem than indexing a hard disk without first explaining why they think they should retain the use of their fingers for continuing to send search terms over a network after I, as the owner of the hardware and 'owner' of the OS instance have made a concerted effort to turn that shit off.

jodrellblank 7y ago
Jeffrey Snover[1] likes to say that "Microsoft is incapable of sustained error", yet they've been incapable of building a good search for at least 15-20 years that I've experienced. Bing search is no competitor to Google, Explorer filesystem search is slow and untrustworthy, the search which integrates desktops to Windows server indexing of fileshares is slow and untrustworthy, on-premises SharePoint search has never worked well for finding documents for me, Start Menu search is the worst at matching plain text strings in short names year after year, Windows version after Windows version, local Outlook Search wasn't great, Outlook search backed by Exchange isn't great, and it goes easily back to Joel on Software's blog post[2] of 2004 where he says > Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973. That's still what I want, and still what they don't do. [1] PowerShell originator, now "Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management Group" at Microsoft. [2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
- jiggawatts 7y ago
  Here's the thing: I've built, back in 2005, a full-text search for 60 GB of small-text data that would typically return results in under 15ms. This was using 100% Microsoft-native technology, like C# and SQL. How much data does the Start Menu search have to index, total? A few 100KB? Something like that. This is assuming a fresh install, no documents, no third party apps. A modern CPU can simply brute force through that amount of data and perform nearly arbitrary subtext matching, without any fancy indexing techniques, in something like a handful of microseconds. Even in an absolute worst-case of cross-process pointer chasing out into uncached main memory, you're talking a few tens of milliseconds, max. Yet, a fresh install of any version of Windows, including Server editions, simply flat out fails to find control panel items or shortcuts even if their names are typed exactly. Many hours later it'll find some of them, not necessarily all. Days later, perhaps it'll reach a 100% match, but that's certainly not guaranteed. For me, often having to use freshly installed Windows VMs, I see a nearly 100% failure rate for this component. It's just absurd that this passed QA.

s_T_e_v_o 7y ago

If I need to search for something outside my policy limited range, I use explorer++. It will find it, and it will allow you to have tabs and to store favorites.

mreome 7y ago

I just wish I could get search to stop returning applications I uninstalled months ago (and yes I've tried deleting and rebuilding the index).

wizzwizz4 7y ago
Perhaps there's a shortcut in Quick Launch? (A Windows 95 feature they decided to get rid of but never quite managed to completely remove.)

nmfisher 7y ago

It's amusing (and infuriating) that file search - IMO, one of the most important features for a desktop O/S - has been utterly broken in Windows since Vista. On Windows 10, half the time it just hangs with "Searching files", displaying zero results. The other half, search simply says "Nothing found", even when I know there is a match. I just tested it with %USERPROFILE%/.docker - open up File Explorer and search for ConfigVersion that appears in config.json. Nada. I have to resort to cygwin/grep any time I want a search that actually works. I never had this problem pre-Vista. I don't know how they managed to go backwards on such a fundamental feature.

0x8BADF00D 7y ago
It’s relatively easy to implement search - you need only minimize the Levenshtein distance between the search string and the file name string. The difficult part is actually indexing all file names and their string contents on the system. Grep is a different tool, mainly using regular expressions to match strings within files and I don’t think it is feasible to be continually loading the contents of all strings contained in all files into memory to perform fuzzy string matching.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  I was always very skeptical about the need for search indexing for local files - how often do you search for stuff to need indexing in the first place? I have a ton of files, certainly more than the average Windows user and i do search for things often enough (at least once a day). To search i use Total Commander (allows for both wildcard/regex searches, archive searches, content search with a bunch of options) which doesn't use indexing at all and search speed was never something i had as a problem (and in general i hate waiting for the computer to do stuff). In what workflows is search needed so often and for so many files that it necessitates indexing? Even back when i first encountered it (in Vista - AFAIK it existed in XP and before but it wasn't enabled by default) i thought it was a waste of resources and unnecessary complexity.
  - ptidhomme 7y ago

rkagerer 7y ago

I've used FileLocator Pro as my Explorer CTRL+F replacement for years, and I love it. Fast, doesn't rely on fragile indexing, and finds stuff Microsoft always seems to miss.

ReptileMan 7y ago

Honestly for non indexed search VoidTools everything is leaps and bounds before windows search. It searches directly in the NTFS dictionaries and is blazing fast.

kwhitefoot 7y ago

Frustration with Windows Start menu search drove me to install Keypirinha: https://keypirinha.com/ https://keypirinha.com/ Specifically: I type ope and the top of the list is Skype, then the Opera folder, then Office. When I add an r then About Your PC is at the top. then opera.pak, and at last Opera. But even if I type Opera the hit I expect is still not at the top of the list. With Keypirinha it remembers which one I choose and promotes it to the top. And that was before Search stopped working. If I didn't need SQL Server and Visual Studio for the work I do I would not have Windows on any of my own hardware.

jimnotgym 7y ago

I have an easier fix than most people on here. I would like the start menu search to be confined to the programs installed on the computer. To search settings make me click the 'cog' first. To search for files there is Explorer, which is already better at the job. To search the web I will use Firefox to access a search engine. Wouldn't that be simpler?

Noumenon72 7y ago
Wow, no. I have no idea what folder a lot of my files are in, because I can find them with Search. And that extra click before accessing settings would be a huge downgrade for me. I am a fan of Windows search, it's one of the biggest improvements to usability they've ever made. Even if it worked better in Windows 7.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

A good search app is called "Search Everything" :)

pedro2 7y ago
You assume everyone has permission to install software :)

mbeex 7y ago

The only things I'm searching this way are related to Windows' own ambiguities and opaqueness. For example, something like classic 'Control Panel' (not quite true, 'bookmarked' it after a while) or special setting menues. Most of these issues are caused by the dual UI. All other things - in particular file search - are much more comfortable with Total Commander, a software providing a sophisticated consistent interface for more than 20 years now, superseding any Windows versions internal abilities easily (including the whole explorer functionality).

awiesenhofer 7y ago

I gave up on windows builtin search a long time ago because its so frustrating - Wox launcher and especially Everything Search is my substitute of choice. Its also incredibly fast! Edit, Links: http://www.wox.one http://www.wox.one https://www.voidtools.com https://www.voidtools.com

worble 7y ago
Just a note - looking at Wox, the official repo seems to be unmaintained, there's appears to be an active fork here however: https://github.com/jjw24/Wox/ https://github.com/jjw24/Wox/

cherrera303 7y ago

I quit using Windows search a long long time ago but I have to admit that it worked better in the WinXP days. Currently using SwiftSearch with very fast results, as it reads directly from the NTFS MFT. No databases, no indexing, no background processes or services. There's also UltraSearch that works with the same idea but is more polished.

BubRoss 7y ago

If you want to see an example of what file search could be like, use the program 'everything'. I have no idea how microsoft creates something so terrible in the first place, let one leaves it that way.

bensonn 7y ago

My search stopped working months ago, typing anything blanked out whole the Start menu. I figured Windows was punishing me for turning Cortana off in the settings. At some point in the last few weeks a Windows update fixed my search. I agree with a lot of posters- I won't use Windows search. It doesn't do what I want or need, and does not function how I expect. I had never heard of Everything but just downloaded it and tried it. It is fast! I typed in YYYY-MM-DD for a few different dates. I have never used OneDrive, do not want to use OneDrive and wish I could uninstall OneDrive. OneDrive creates ~10 new files every day. The broken (now fixed but still stupid) search is just a symptom of a bloated quantity-over-quality, walled-garden, rented-not-owned, OSaaS.

thrower123 7y ago

Even the most insane Start menu shouldn't have enough items that you couldn't just put all the items it contains in an in-memory list and do a dumb startsWith search, and be lightning fast and more reliable than whatever insanity it is doing out of the box these days.

asdfpoiu10 7y ago

Anyone catch the IP or know the URL search phones home to? I suspect I would not be the only one who would want to pi-hole this.

iamAtom 7y ago

Recently my respect to apple is growing more and more because of issues like this. Apple is always criticised for lack of innovations compared to its competitors but their attention to smaller details and ensuring their products just "work" proved to be more valuable to customers than dozens of broken features. Edit: Of course there are some exceptions like apple maps

dekalbcountyman 7y ago

Hey does this effect LTSC? Like, I read the article and looked at the comments and Search works fine and great for me, always have Been a macOS user since the start of my career, but I have been enjoying Windows 10 LTSC

jammygit 7y ago

“we all found out that our local search boxes are somehow dependent on some service working at Microsoft.” She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum ‘Pinocchio score’ for a lack of trust. I miss Ubuntu (minus their amazon scandal...)

jmc5788 7y ago

Classic Shell has continued to make Windows 8/10 far more functional, IMO. The start menu wasn’t broken, and simple is good if you ask me. http://www.classicshell.net/ http://www.classicshell.net/