You can replace Windows Search with anything up to and including a divining rod and you'll be pleased with the result.
I installed a home NAS two years ago and started placing all my various data files from my home PCs onto it. Some folders got pretty large, as in more than 1,000 entries. Whenever I tried opening those folders in Windows Explorer, it took ages. Anything under 400 files was slow but acceptable, anything above a thousand was agonizing.
People were telling me it was the protocol used by network access (wasn't that named SMB ?). I was seriously miffed that a bloomin' protocol had transformed my storage dream into a bloated snail.
For reasons I do not recall, I decided to try removing Windows Search from my PC (you know, Uninstall, Windows Options, Search). Once done (and rebooted), I opened a folder on my NAS. To my surprise, in the millisecond after I clicked, there it was. Just like a local disk, actually.
Needless to say, Windows Search has been removed from all of my PCs. I use Everything Search now, for the rare occasions when I don't quite remember where I stored something and, you know what ? Everything Search doesn't take five bloody minutes to find a result. Not even five seconds. The result is there practically as I type. You know, like it should be on a system that is ten million times more powerful than the one I had ten years ago.
Windows is the only OS that has succeeded in taking all the performance gains hardware ever offered and keeping UI response times at the same levels since '95.