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.
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.
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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
I've actually had issues with locate finding things before. I haven't delved into it's docs, but on several occasions while searching for source code, libraries, etc, it hasn't turned up results that were obviously there. "sudo find /" only takes 3 or 4 seconds, and I get EVERYTHING. It's pretty perfect for me.
Spotlight search is 100% local unless "Spotlight Suggestions" is enabled. Even then, the search works exactly the same but is augmented with online content (like sports scores, weather, suggested websites, etc) where relevant.
Apple has made this mistake about seven different times, the earliest being with Sherlock on OS9. Mixing local file search with Internet search solves no problem and causes chaos. The use cases for the two kinds of search are very different and users prefer using different tools for these jobs. Just stop doing this, Apple and Microsoft.
Totally agreed, and Spotlight does the same now on both macOS and iOS. I usually turn everything off in Spotlight except the file search, calculator and conversions. But overall it's still not nearly as bad as Windows'.
It's weirder with Apple. You can see why Microsoft might do it - it's not in the user's interest, but it is in Microsoft's interest to get more Bing usage. But for Apple, they hardly care how much I use Google.
I don’t know if I had this bug. Search on my desktop wasn’t working yesterday, but it almost never works right, so I /barely noticed anything was unusual/.
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?
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.
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.
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".
I can't believe you'd suggest something as rediculous as users wanting a unified search bar that just gives them what they want regardless of context. History has shown time and time again that users like diversity and would prefer a solution that they can tailor together in a piecemeal fashion after trying all their options.
At this point.. I think it's fair to call it a MS tradition. I don't think I ever recall searching in windows to be useful out of the box (or even after tweaking).
they failed to find a good place for that search, but the feature, itself, is extremely valuable.
on the mac, for example, spotlight search is part of things i do on autopilot. that's how they should have presented that search functionality. a keyboard shortcut, big search field in the middle of the screen... cortana shouldn't have been the front focus here...
i still use it though. would be sad to see it go! i use it to see where stuff and settings that were obvious and easy to find before are now hidden.
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.
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.
Gaming "just works" on windows and has for a lot longer with much better performance. Valve has done great things but they aren't fixing my NVidia driver issues on Ubuntu.
For support/tech debt I'm talking about enterprise. There is some out there but it's not so much for your daily users. FOSS exists for stuff like word, but excel (not your casual spreadsheets, I mean full on enterprise applications hacked together in excel), a business's ERP or CRM interface of choice (although this is mostly in the browser afaiui), the tons of legacy apps that need IE to function... yea. It's changing, but it's not great. And no one cares about mailing lists and online communities for support.
In terms of UI, most graphical shells don't pass the grandma test. The default icons are horrible, the workflow is completely alien to people used to one way of doing things, and that's bad for casual users. Yes they can get over it, but they can also just use windows like they do at school and work.
Basically it comes down to the fact the things average folks use windows for work great and they're familiar with it and need to use it at work or wherever. With linux they have no idea what distros to install, or how to do it on their machines that came with windows and don't have easy ways of moving their existing files to their new Linux box. There's just no incentives to use Linux for the average person.
I say this as an ardent Linux user at home and work. I know how great it is, but I don't pretend that it makes sense for my dad who's been on Windows forever or my mom who's been on Mac forever.
Agreed. I tend to play games with lower graphical needs, so I feel the effects of lacking Nvidia support less.
Ah, yeah, enterprise level applications are another beast. I'm currently dealing with maintenance and upgrade of legacy VB6 motion control systems at work, and there's just no way any of it can be ported out of Windows (2000).
I somewhat disagree about the Grandma test (at least for going from Windows to Linux; macOS has a very different feel). What do most causal users do with a PC? What I've observed is maybe 60% web browsing, 20% documentation, 20% media. Ubuntu comes with a drop in browser, drop in spreadsheet/text editor, and automatically launched media players. Discoverability is an issue, because none of these applications have exactly the same names, but Ubuntu's Window Key search function is smart enough to find these drop-ins with even vague search terms. With that ability, I'm arguing that the workflow for casual users is very similar, with a minor learning curve for new names and icons.
Windows works great for casual users until: Windows update kicks in, Windows encounters a vague error, Windows unified search stops working (or fails to find files they know are there), or some application won't work for some unknown reason.
Any technology you are familiar with will seem more familiar than any that you aren't; I get that argument. But at the same time, people are capable of learning new things, and they already learned Windows from scratch. It took effort for me to learn how to use Windows, same as other OS's. And with Linux laptops starting to become more of a thing, we're going to see fewer people who's first OS is either Mac or Windows (unfortunately it seems like it's becoming more and more Android or iOS)
I definitely roll my eyes when people say that on Windows everything "just works".
I have to fix (or just deal with the fact that I cannot do anything about it) just as many things that break or go wrong with Windows as I do with Linux.
Hacking around with the registry is just that. A hack job to roughly get Windows to behave until the next update breaks it.
At least on Linux you have the whole system open to you and can roll back changes or apply patches with much more control.
Even after a decade as a Windows power user, touching the registry is absolutely a last resort option; the number of side effects, unintended consequences, and chances of registry corruption are crazy. There's no solid documentation! I'd rather (and have) make changes to the kernel on my Linux box, edit drivers, mess with the boot sequence. You can read about what each thing does, make backups, and like you said, just restore a previous state. So much more straightforward than messing with vague hex values...
But for some people it just does work. Without the need for any hacks, just some tweaking of settings. So when I see people saying they roll there eyes when they they see those claims, I say: think a bit further, consider other factors. Like, it depends on what you do with it perhaps, on the hardware?
I agree that for some people, they stick with Windows because their hardware and software does just work. Compatibility with the things you do is important.
However we are in a thread about how Windows 10 search just up an broke and whose only permanent fix is to disable part of it in the registry.
The search function barely works compared to alternatives too.
People can absolutely stick with Windows but I was referring to people who argue that they cannot try alternatives because they don't "just work" and you have use a command line and do all this configuration stuff.
I have less problems on Linux and most of them are of my own creation, trying to run software in wine or use hardware with non-free drivers.
It helps to adapt to doing things the Linux way when using Linux instead of contiuing to operate in a Windows mindset.
people who argue that they cannot try alternatives because they don't "just work"
Fair enough, but your argumentation still sounds like 'works for me so it's all fine' which is the main point I was addressing. I.e. it's not because you have less problems on linux that others do as well, and hence they could make a rather valid argument that they gave up trying. Which doesn't mean all people complaining like that are right of course. It's never so black/white.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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).
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
It would be useful for the user to be linked to a vetted and official store app if the name matches and the user does not have it installed already. Although there are privacy considerations about sending search terms to the Internet, so a list of store apps could be cached on the local machine instead.
Basically agree but would quibble with your 1. If I've pinned an application (as I do for anything I use regularly) surely it's because I want to launch it quickly via the taskbar rather than having to go via search. If I'm in search it's because I'm looking for something else.
True for you, but not everyone. I find tapping the windows key, typing a few letters, then tapping enter, is much faster and comfortable than touching the mouse.
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.
Maybe the varying results can be explained by your searches being routed to different servers, with each server having slightly different indexes or algorithms?
Do you see the same issue when disconnected from the web?
I actually turn off all the annoying web targets, I’m mainly interested in launching apps (which frankly should simplify the problem and make reliable results more likely).
No, you just need to record and track wheights for each selected or pinned search term. This way you can update the index and all meaningful entries will still be displayed in the same order due to the influence of the wheights.
Order should change, but if I type "Ble" I would like Blender (the only entry I ever selected after typing "Ble" to come first and not some random file I never ever opened manually.
Sometimes search just fails to work - I have not seen that before 10. The search bar in explorer windows appears disabled (can't use it), or worse, it doesn't list some files - some searches work fine, some don't. Have to close all windows and reopen. Jesus Christ.
If the index isn't updated instantly then they should account for that by first searching the index (for speed) and then manually trawling through the Start Menu folders for results which are missing from the index.
Weird. I too have qBittorent installed and the Start menu search finds it as first option when I type 'bitt' ('bit' gives 64-bit Python launcher)... not too shabby.
Good catch, so if you type "bitto" then hit backspace to "bitt", it works, but hit backspace again ("bit") and it'll disappear (it even shows me "Notepad", because why not)!
At this point in this thread, I'm starting to hope someone reverse engineer windows search, and do a write-up of how the indexing, stemming and search actually works...
Apple's spotlight has had these kind of features for a long time too, though most of the time it mostly works.
It loses your input, it baits-and-switches, it opens completely irrelevant software (often uninstallers that immediately begin an uninstall process or never-used settings pages), some applications are plain missing from there and have to be accessed through the application menu always.
I start typing "Code", by the time "Cod" is typed, I see VS Code and want to press enter, before I realize that, I get done typing the "e" and out of nowhere "code.bat" (whatever that is) appears and gets executed.
Stable at a PoS level.
Windows search is the worst part about Windows 10 for me and I have no idea how anyone ever thought it was at a better than some pre-alpha stage. All the different updates do, are make it behave in new utterly dumb ways.
On Windows 8.1, when I want to run Paint.NET I have to remember to accept the suggestion before typing the full name; it guesses correctly until I finish the .net, at which point it decides I want to open a web page.
(Honestly though I'm pretty happy with it, it's good enough that I never miss the old-fashioned Start menu like I expected to.)
As someone who was regularly frustrated with the problems you describe, it seems that recently (I think with the 1903 upgrade, but not sure) things have gotten a lot better and I finally feel the start menu is listening to me again.
This system no doubt sits on years of dusty debt, but really how hard can it be?
There are literally dozens of third party search/launch apps that are better.
I don’t know what kind of matching it uses but it’s not good. Is it prefix only? Is it case sensitive? What metadata is used in the match (what is displayed as a program name or something else)?
If I started writing a simple indexer app with an SQLite file and a little search box I’d have something more useful for finding apps after one afternoon.
So what exactly is the Windows search trying to do that I’m not considering, that makes it so hard that it fails with the trivial stuff like text matching?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The second half of the quote is, “but sometimes it takes us a couple decades to get right”. :-)
Seriously though, have you checked out the search in O365?
It is starting to get really good and wait till you see how this progresses in the next couple of years.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed. updatedb from the locate package is typically the first thing that I uninstall on a new Linux installation.
The nightly cronjob definitely consumes a lot more resources over time then it will ever save me waiting time.
Searching everything takes lots of time, searching through an indexed database takes less than a second. When in windows I use a locate-port[1] that I use to index any local disks as well as remote network shares of interest. It would take about an hour to search everything.
But an hour wouldn't be that bad, the problem arises when you are not quite sure what you are looking for. Getting the response back instantaneous is invaluable because you can refine your search in seconds.
And your use case makes sense; but your use case is not typical for 99% of desktop OS users.
And instantaneous results mean nothing if they're worthless. I'd rather let you turn on indexing because you need it and it matches your use case. Leave the other 99% alone.
Windows default was ok but slow in XP and absolutely unusable since. Any benefit to search would be a massive benefit to millions of people.
Doesn't have to be indexed but would certainly help. I guess SSDs are quick enough many times but it is absolutely essential if a regular hard drive is in the picture.
I use Everything [0], a similar program which is designed to stay resident and essentially become part of your keyboard muscle memory. I have a couple custom shortcuts configured so I can easily open the result, open the result and hide the Everything dialog, or open the folder containing the result.
I personally never use search tools; at least, not with files I've created myself. IMHO organising correctly your files using aptly named directories and sticking to that is much more effective than dumping stuff around the filesystem and then having to rely on search in order to untangle the mess. That's why I tend to disable desktop icons; in this way I always have to force myself into opening a file manager and actually decide where the files should be put into.
Yea I was thinking about this and I never use OS search either. I suspect the reason it's "broken" is because Microsoft has the data that says most people don't use the feature and therefore it's not worth the improvement cost.
Do you have a neat and organized desktop? Most people just have a mess of shortcuts and that's how they launch programs. But also consider that most people use maybe 2 or 3 apps all the time and rarely explore outside of that.
> IMHO organising correctly your files using aptly named directories
I have a lot of ebooks on my computer (> 10000). One problem with organising books and other PDFs is that sometimes they fall into multiple categories. (Should a new scientific article on lucid dreaming go into 'brain and cognitive science' or 'meditation' or 'hypnosis' or 'sleep' or 'self improvement'?) I could dump each new file into the directory representing the first category that comes to mind and make symbolic links from directories referring to other categories, but in the end the number of categories is practically endless. Search is in practice the only workable solution.
I'm a data hoarder and I organize meticulously, so I get where you're coming from. But I often need to do searches along different dimensions than the "primary keys" I chose for organizing the directory structure. Search is indispensable for this.
As an example, say I have records related to my taxes - a bunch of documents and images - organized into directories by year, and I want to copy all of the images for the last 5 years out into a temporary directory so that I can flip through them easily. I can browse to my taxes directory, do a search for "kind:picture" then sort the results by modified date and drag the relevant items into the destination directory.
For some types of tasks this is so convenient that sometimes when I'm ssh'd into a server on my home network I'll move files into a mounted network share so that I can manipulate them from Windows Explorer. Clicking around a graphical file explorer is just way less cognitive overhead than stringing together a big command on the command line. Windows Explorer in the Windows 10 era isn't great, but it's much better than e.g. Finder or Thunar, which are my other options on my home computers.
Unfortunately, even that is particularly impractical on windows. I'm not sure exactly who thought up the disastrous library feature, but the net effect is that it makes it really, really hard to organize stuff into folders. The arbitrary top-level boxes MS thought of are always in the way; and they're sometimes an alias for a folder, but in other ways quite different. If truly everthing were easily mountable inside a library, then maybe it would work... but the reality is that people (shockingly) have multiple storage devices, and libraries work terribly with that. But I think worst is just the generally inconsistency; everything is "special" and nothing works quite like anything else. Add to that the fact that all kinds of programs store their "user" data in your documents, using poorly-names hardcoded folder names (including lots of microsoft apps), and pretty quickly everything just turns really messy. I don't think I know anybody - technically inclined or no - that seems to be using the library feature as it was intended; most people either just accept utter chaos, and treat the PC largely as throwaway or hope they can find something using search (oh boy); or they use a parallel structure entirely divorces from the libraries, and live with the fact that lots of the OS apps and views will then make you jump through hoops to access stuff where you actually store it, because the OS always offers stuff like libraries first.
Folders work. Tags can work. Search can work. The frankenstein folder-search monster that is windows 10 used as designed - that simply doesn't work for anybody.
This tool is wonderful - mindbogglingly fast. I can't believe how long it has been around, without equivalent performance or consistency baked into Windows. I think I first used this before Vista came out - has it really been that long?
++This. Does the essentials such as real time [NTFS] drive monitoring from journals, small memory footprint, presents an accessible and responsive cancel dialogue when a operation will require lots of STATs (like sort many files by size), and has good boolean operators and semi-smart parsing of search lines and Bingo, ""quotes, optionally includes paths, stores file class (audio, video, doc etc) in short-index.
For full content search with several viewers and "jump to it and see" preview -- but only for selected document folders, I use DocFectcher. Matching files are presented in a windowpane you can further sort by relevance or -Date (my default), name or size. Reindexing is not done in real time when you change or add files but a small process watches indexed folders and just saves flags of what changes so index update can happen quickly when the main program is run.
the .docker problem is because (IIRC) by default the indexing service is set to ignore a bunch of folders. I think Program Files is also excluded by default, which is fun if you want to run an .exe file.
File search seems to have steadily declined with each version at least since XP. The underlying pattern seems to be the combination of more features with a simpler interface. The inevitable result is less transparency for the user. Microsoft's search features have demonstrated repeatedly that this is a bad idea, and what's most puzzling is why they keep doing it.
Google maps is another product where useful features are regularly broken by 'improvements'.
Some of my scientific instruments are decades old and I like to be able to search back quite a number of years compared to most offices.
It's worth the effort to be the most reliable and repeatable you can get.
I don't like search to be slow or questionable, and of course it needs to return the same results from the same archive every time.
And indexing is not helpful, I usually want to search within every file.
Using a 2GHz processor with adequate memory and identical HDD, with no indexing and background services minimized,
Best performance was found with W95, then W98, then Wxp, all on FAT32 volumes.
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x not acceptable.
On a modern 2GHz multicore processor and adequate memory and identical HDD (but different than above), with no indexing and background services minimized,
Best performance is found with Wxp on FAT32 volumes.
_its nice to know W9x would help out in this situation if really needed
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x less acceptable than ever.
.
The good thing about Google search was when it would return the same first-page results for anyone anywhere until something different had newly gained higher ranking among everyone altogether.
Going back a lot further, the promise of TV without commercial interruption was so long overdue it was wonderfully realized decades earlier in the 1970's by your friendly neighborhood cable TV company. That's why a private content-providing network was installed to premises to begin with, having better bandwidth than the original communication lines from the phone company monopoly.
Maybe they are all just trying to improve shareholder results through time at the expense of customer results, the old-fashioned way.
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.
Frustration with Windows Start menu search drove me to install Keypirinha: 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.
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.
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.
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).
188 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadEvery 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>
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I can agree. But the push by all browsers seems to be more search. Not less.
There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg:
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.
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10
You can even install (and write your own) plugins for it, e.g. a calculator plugin.
https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox
Good job, Microsoft.
Microsoft used their OS monopoly to destroy Netscape. Not sure if it will work today since they don't dominate the smartphone space.
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".
Firefox, linux, open source. It's really funny how a lot of open source projects are hosted in github.
Compare this to stuff like Everything..
on the mac, for example, spotlight search is part of things i do on autopilot. that's how they should have presented that search functionality. a keyboard shortcut, big search field in the middle of the screen... cortana shouldn't have been the front focus here...
i still use it though. would be sad to see it go! i use it to see where stuff and settings that were obvious and easy to find before are now hidden.
It's a shame it's no longer developed.
I used to find this aggravating but it’s better to accept it and move on.
Gaming, support, decades of technical debt, and familiar user interfaces/workflows for non-technical users.
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.
For support/tech debt I'm talking about enterprise. There is some out there but it's not so much for your daily users. FOSS exists for stuff like word, but excel (not your casual spreadsheets, I mean full on enterprise applications hacked together in excel), a business's ERP or CRM interface of choice (although this is mostly in the browser afaiui), the tons of legacy apps that need IE to function... yea. It's changing, but it's not great. And no one cares about mailing lists and online communities for support.
In terms of UI, most graphical shells don't pass the grandma test. The default icons are horrible, the workflow is completely alien to people used to one way of doing things, and that's bad for casual users. Yes they can get over it, but they can also just use windows like they do at school and work.
Basically it comes down to the fact the things average folks use windows for work great and they're familiar with it and need to use it at work or wherever. With linux they have no idea what distros to install, or how to do it on their machines that came with windows and don't have easy ways of moving their existing files to their new Linux box. There's just no incentives to use Linux for the average person.
I say this as an ardent Linux user at home and work. I know how great it is, but I don't pretend that it makes sense for my dad who's been on Windows forever or my mom who's been on Mac forever.
Ah, yeah, enterprise level applications are another beast. I'm currently dealing with maintenance and upgrade of legacy VB6 motion control systems at work, and there's just no way any of it can be ported out of Windows (2000).
I somewhat disagree about the Grandma test (at least for going from Windows to Linux; macOS has a very different feel). What do most causal users do with a PC? What I've observed is maybe 60% web browsing, 20% documentation, 20% media. Ubuntu comes with a drop in browser, drop in spreadsheet/text editor, and automatically launched media players. Discoverability is an issue, because none of these applications have exactly the same names, but Ubuntu's Window Key search function is smart enough to find these drop-ins with even vague search terms. With that ability, I'm arguing that the workflow for casual users is very similar, with a minor learning curve for new names and icons.
Windows works great for casual users until: Windows update kicks in, Windows encounters a vague error, Windows unified search stops working (or fails to find files they know are there), or some application won't work for some unknown reason.
Any technology you are familiar with will seem more familiar than any that you aren't; I get that argument. But at the same time, people are capable of learning new things, and they already learned Windows from scratch. It took effort for me to learn how to use Windows, same as other OS's. And with Linux laptops starting to become more of a thing, we're going to see fewer people who's first OS is either Mac or Windows (unfortunately it seems like it's becoming more and more Android or iOS)
I have to fix (or just deal with the fact that I cannot do anything about it) just as many things that break or go wrong with Windows as I do with Linux.
Hacking around with the registry is just that. A hack job to roughly get Windows to behave until the next update breaks it.
At least on Linux you have the whole system open to you and can roll back changes or apply patches with much more control.
However we are in a thread about how Windows 10 search just up an broke and whose only permanent fix is to disable part of it in the registry.
The search function barely works compared to alternatives too.
People can absolutely stick with Windows but I was referring to people who argue that they cannot try alternatives because they don't "just work" and you have use a command line and do all this configuration stuff.
I have less problems on Linux and most of them are of my own creation, trying to run software in wine or use hardware with non-free drivers.
It helps to adapt to doing things the Linux way when using Linux instead of contiuing to operate in a Windows mindset.
Fair enough, but your argumentation still sounds like 'works for me so it's all fine' which is the main point I was addressing. I.e. it's not because you have less problems on linux that others do as well, and hence they could make a rather valid argument that they gave up trying. Which doesn't mean all people complaining like that are right of course. It's never so black/white.
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.
It's a convenience tool. If you look up everything you can do it all manually.
dang: I'm done with this bullshit, it's ok to delete my account.
I think you can stop reading right there.
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.
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).
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
I LIKE Windows 10, but that particular "feature" is a no go for me.
Do you see the same issue when disconnected from the web?
Sounds like you want to freeze search index at some point in time. This is actually useless. Also keep in mind that indexing is a background task.
Order should change, but if I type "Ble" I would like Blender (the only entry I ever selected after typing "Ble" to come first and not some random file I never ever opened manually.
Then, i tried searching again, and it comes up, 3rd time lucky.. Doesn't make sense at all!
Q -> nothing
Qg/Qg -> Qgis
QGi -> nothing
Qgis -> websearch
bit -> Bitlocker
bitt -> qBittorrent (yay!)
bitto to bittorent -> web search
It loses your input, it baits-and-switches, it opens completely irrelevant software (often uninstallers that immediately begin an uninstall process or never-used settings pages), some applications are plain missing from there and have to be accessed through the application menu always.
Features? Surely, you mean these kind of bugs? :)
I start typing "Code", by the time "Cod" is typed, I see VS Code and want to press enter, before I realize that, I get done typing the "e" and out of nowhere "code.bat" (whatever that is) appears and gets executed.
Stable at a PoS level.
Windows search is the worst part about Windows 10 for me and I have no idea how anyone ever thought it was at a better than some pre-alpha stage. All the different updates do, are make it behave in new utterly dumb ways.
Luckily Keypiranha means I rarely ever need it.
(Honestly though I'm pretty happy with it, it's good enough that I never miss the old-fashioned Start menu like I expected to.)
There are literally dozens of third party search/launch apps that are better.
I don’t know what kind of matching it uses but it’s not good. Is it prefix only? Is it case sensitive? What metadata is used in the match (what is displayed as a program name or something else)?
If I started writing a simple indexer app with an SQLite file and a little search box I’d have something more useful for finding apps after one afternoon.
So what exactly is the Windows search trying to do that I’m not considering, that makes it so hard that it fails with the trivial stuff like text matching?
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.
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.
Still thinking of buying Alfred but I'm undecided. Have you tried it?
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.
> 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...
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.
Seriously though, have you checked out the search in O365? It is starting to get really good and wait till you see how this progresses in the next couple of years.
I think I’ll be proven right. :-)
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.
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.
Searching everything takes lots of time, searching through an indexed database takes less than a second. When in windows I use a locate-port[1] that I use to index any local disks as well as remote network shares of interest. It would take about an hour to search everything.
But an hour wouldn't be that bad, the problem arises when you are not quite sure what you are looking for. Getting the response back instantaneous is invaluable because you can refine your search in seconds.
[1] https://locate32.cogit.net/
And instantaneous results mean nothing if they're worthless. I'd rather let you turn on indexing because you need it and it matches your use case. Leave the other 99% alone.
Windows default was ok but slow in XP and absolutely unusable since. Any benefit to search would be a massive benefit to millions of people.
Doesn't have to be indexed but would certainly help. I guess SSDs are quick enough many times but it is absolutely essential if a regular hard drive is in the picture.
[0] https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
okay, ...
> and their string contents on the system
... why would you even do that? ls-lR.gz works. And that’s exactly what people wants 80% of time.
In general, I find it very hard to believe this is a people few users rely on. It's the primary way to launch programs for me.
I have a lot of ebooks on my computer (> 10000). One problem with organising books and other PDFs is that sometimes they fall into multiple categories. (Should a new scientific article on lucid dreaming go into 'brain and cognitive science' or 'meditation' or 'hypnosis' or 'sleep' or 'self improvement'?) I could dump each new file into the directory representing the first category that comes to mind and make symbolic links from directories referring to other categories, but in the end the number of categories is practically endless. Search is in practice the only workable solution.
Manual classification is still useful to classify documents according to labels that are not present as strings in the books' contents though.
https://calibre-ebook.com/
Calibre has nice search by 'title:', 'author:', and 'vl:' but eventually it has still the same problem of endless categorisation.
As an example, say I have records related to my taxes - a bunch of documents and images - organized into directories by year, and I want to copy all of the images for the last 5 years out into a temporary directory so that I can flip through them easily. I can browse to my taxes directory, do a search for "kind:picture" then sort the results by modified date and drag the relevant items into the destination directory.
For some types of tasks this is so convenient that sometimes when I'm ssh'd into a server on my home network I'll move files into a mounted network share so that I can manipulate them from Windows Explorer. Clicking around a graphical file explorer is just way less cognitive overhead than stringing together a big command on the command line. Windows Explorer in the Windows 10 era isn't great, but it's much better than e.g. Finder or Thunar, which are my other options on my home computers.
Folders work. Tags can work. Search can work. The frankenstein folder-search monster that is windows 10 used as designed - that simply doesn't work for anybody.
++This. Does the essentials such as real time [NTFS] drive monitoring from journals, small memory footprint, presents an accessible and responsive cancel dialogue when a operation will require lots of STATs (like sort many files by size), and has good boolean operators and semi-smart parsing of search lines and Bingo, ""quotes, optionally includes paths, stores file class (audio, video, doc etc) in short-index.
For full content search with several viewers and "jump to it and see" preview -- but only for selected document folders, I use DocFectcher. Matching files are presented in a windowpane you can further sort by relevance or -Date (my default), name or size. Reindexing is not done in real time when you change or add files but a small process watches indexed folders and just saves flags of what changes so index update can happen quickly when the main program is run.
http://docfetcher.sourceforge.net/en/index.html
Google maps is another product where useful features are regularly broken by 'improvements'.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-7-file-search-index...
Some of my scientific instruments are decades old and I like to be able to search back quite a number of years compared to most offices.
It's worth the effort to be the most reliable and repeatable you can get.
I don't like search to be slow or questionable, and of course it needs to return the same results from the same archive every time.
And indexing is not helpful, I usually want to search within every file.
Using a 2GHz processor with adequate memory and identical HDD, with no indexing and background services minimized, Best performance was found with W95, then W98, then Wxp, all on FAT32 volumes.
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x not acceptable.
On a modern 2GHz multicore processor and adequate memory and identical HDD (but different than above), with no indexing and background services minimized, Best performance is found with Wxp on FAT32 volumes. _its nice to know W9x would help out in this situation if really needed
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x less acceptable than ever.
.
The good thing about Google search was when it would return the same first-page results for anyone anywhere until something different had newly gained higher ranking among everyone altogether.
Going back a lot further, the promise of TV without commercial interruption was so long overdue it was wonderfully realized decades earlier in the 1970's by your friendly neighborhood cable TV company. That's why a private content-providing network was installed to premises to begin with, having better bandwidth than the original communication lines from the phone company monopoly.
Maybe they are all just trying to improve shareholder results through time at the expense of customer results, the old-fashioned way.
Fast, doesn't rely on fragile indexing, and finds stuff Microsoft always seems to miss.
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.
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?
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).