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As a life-long Windows user, the most frustrating part is how broken search is, and always has been, but… in new and unique ways in every version I’ve ever used

As a life-long Windows user, the most frustrating part is how broken search is, and always has been, but… in new and unique ways in every version I’ve ever used! It’s astonishing: they’re clearly working on it, making material changes, but only ever sideways. I’ve never observed an improvement. To those people that say “version x has worked”: I doubt it. Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu. Maybe you just got used to what search terms work, and forgot about it. But I assure you that it has never “just worked”. I still have a habit of searching for “management” in the start menu because if I type “SQL”, it won’t ever find “SQL Management Studio”.

fbdab103 4y ago
>Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu Yet another beef of mine. The Search Indexer runs frequently, chews up a lot of CPU, and always engages my fans into turbo mode. I know that 99% of my files at any given moment are identical to the last month. Windows, you have all the hooks to know the last time a file was modified. Stop re-scanning everything forever.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Then they would have to learn about the NTFS change journal[1]. Learning how to program their own operating system would be a step too far. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/change-journals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/chang...
binarysneaker 4y ago
Don't worry, I expect Microsoft will replace their search with gpt in the future. "Hey Windows, find me that work presentation I worked on a while back".
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
It's been baffling to me how such a high % of the world is using this OS for work but the search function is fundamentally not functioning. I have the same set of files on two machines and its actually faster for me to turn to the mac, search on there to find where the file will be on my windows machine than to watch the windows search churn away for minutes only to not find it. Not to mention if it does find it there is this obtuse dance you have to do to get it to actually open the containing folder in a way thats navigable because the search results are all fake shortcut links or something that burn the path hierarchy. Rolls my eyes every time I bump into that.
aagha 4y ago
Fluent Search [0] with Everything for your woes. 0 - https://fluentsearch.net/ https://fluentsearch.net/

fbdab103 4y ago

>Maybe after a month it successfully indexed the 100KB of text in your start menu Yet another beef of mine. The Search Indexer runs frequently, chews up a lot of CPU, and always engages my fans into turbo mode. I know that 99% of my files at any given moment are identical to the last month. Windows, you have all the hooks to know the last time a file was modified. Stop re-scanning everything forever.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Then they would have to learn about the NTFS change journal[1]. Learning how to program their own operating system would be a step too far. [1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/change-journals https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/chang...

binarysneaker 4y ago

Don't worry, I expect Microsoft will replace their search with gpt in the future. "Hey Windows, find me that work presentation I worked on a while back".

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

It's been baffling to me how such a high % of the world is using this OS for work but the search function is fundamentally not functioning. I have the same set of files on two machines and its actually faster for me to turn to the mac, search on there to find where the file will be on my windows machine than to watch the windows search churn away for minutes only to not find it. Not to mention if it does find it there is this obtuse dance you have to do to get it to actually open the containing folder in a way thats navigable because the search results are all fake shortcut links or something that burn the path hierarchy. Rolls my eyes every time I bump into that.

aagha 4y ago

Fluent Search [0] with Everything for your woes. 0 - https://fluentsearch.net/ https://fluentsearch.net/