Microsoft rolls out Windows Search updates and they're... quite good Microsoft has made good on a promise to make Windows Search less of a chore to use, making tweaks to remove "promotional content" from web results and options to focus on local results. The changes are currently limited to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel. March Rogers, partner director for product design for Windows …
I just had the latest Win 11 updates this week and search is indeed faster and more accurate on my local PC.
But my expectations were low as well. So... it's better, I guess? Seems like it.
Still hate M$ and they will never have my confidence for the rest of my life, but... the improvement seems real. But it was a VERY low bar to begin with.
"But it was a VERY low bar to begin with."
So very true. My experience of Windows Search in 10 or 11 is...
In an Explorer window: I type the partial (or even full) name of a file that I know is present in a subdirectory; it ignores the first press of the <return> key completely and I have to click the adjacent button to kick it into "life". Ten minutes later, if I'm lucky, it'll find the file.
From the Search box on the Start menu: it instantly returns web search results and Store results and completely irrelevant content, and also, if I'm lucky, maybe 50% of the time, the actual local files.
In a command prompt window, using DIR /s <searchterm>: near-instant results, showing all matches.
I dont't remember the GUI search options (where they existed) being so crap in Windows 2000/XP/7, but perhaps that's just nostalgia?
My all time favourite Windows Search shenanigans began when Windows informed me that SomeBigFile.iso finished downloading in their annoying-by-default notification. Typing the exact name into taskbar search then yielded a "We have never heard of that file".
Regressing so badly on a paid product that fixing functions that worked 20 years ago is something elese.
Update: Yeah, very low qualified bar of "sort of better"
The taskbar search works better than ever. The search bar in file explorer? Faster, but far less accurate. And by far I mean, terrible. The speed is incredible. The accuracy in file explorer is very, very bad.
We'll see what the next update brings..
The trouble with traditional Windows Search (i.e. the search box in File Explorer) is it's never been well documented, and it has some odd defaults. Which is a shame, because it's been one of Windows' best features for a long time, if you could remember how to use it. For example, if you search for "name:foo", it will find "foo_bar.txt" and "foo-bar.nfo" but not "foobar.c" - it's looking for your search term as a delimited entity within the filename. If you want it to behave the way probably most people would expect it to, you need to search for "name:~=foo", which will find also find "foobar.c" - now it's just looking for your search term as a simple substring of the filenames. I guess denizens of El Reg may know that kind of thing, but your average user, not so much.
I'd expect that sort of requirement at the command line. Not for a search box used by the officr secretary who has some crystals blu tacked to the monitor to focus the bad away, and is terrified that windows has been hacked if someone uses a different font in an email.
Pretty happy with Agent Ransack myself. At least it does not do the whole search again if I only want to change the sort order of the results.
What I also have resorted to is listing all filenames on my network shares along with the date in a text file and using the search function in Notepad++ to quickly find files by name. The powershell command for this is:
Get-ChildItem P:\ -File -Recurse | % { "{0:yyyy-MM-dd} {1}" -f $_.LastWriteTime,$_.FullName } > filelist.txt
where P: points to the fileshare.
I also concatenate multiple file shares to the same file. For me by far the fastest way to find a file among the 1.5 million on the network shares that do not change that often.
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So it's 2026, and MICROS~1 finally manages to get a basic search function not to suck too hard. Right.
I have run updatedb in a cron job once every 24 hours and used the locate command for more years than I can remember on my Linux boxen, and it's always worked quickly, painlessly, efficiently and accurately, thank you very much. For content searches 'grep -ilr ...' works fine. And all with a minimum of system load.
Nice that MS is finally starting to move into that direction. Now let's see if they can do something about the ridiculous overhead of their search "service". Once they get that right maybe they can debloat the rest of it as well. And pigs might fly in the middle of... Oh, wait.
In theory, the Windows index should be incremental… but it's always been a resource pig with poor control.
I think MacOS does a pretty good job, though I have had it fail a couple of times recently, and it should by default not index external drives instead of this requiring some arcane command line magic.
Of course, there are still plenty of occasions when I still want to use find.
I can only assume that this is an unfortunate side effect of fucking up something else.
I am well aware that MS' main objective is to make everything ten times more difficult or awkward than it needs to be and that ''carefully curated partner '' companies' shite and their own shite is to be hawked at eveyone all of the time.
In Win 7 I was able to come back from work with hundreds of photographs and dump them into a job folder. Any duplicates would be highlighted and I could either deal with them individually or as a group ''replace all with the new ones'' or ''leave the originals in place and copy the rest''
In Win 10 this got scrapped and now you have to double click everything and confirm every fucking single item separately. Who the fuck thinks that is progress?
Things that you could do with one or two button presses now need two, three or more. Why are they allowed to do this because it costs every other company, government or person time and / or money for no benefit.
In Windows 10 File Explorer search, a list of recent searches would handily appear that could be picked from to reuse. That feature disappeared with W11 never to return.
Also I have a very low spec travel laptop with W11. Searching a local folder is fast. Searching my Google Drive folder is extremely slow to the point of hanging up.
Looking forward to the fixes!
There is always 'The Scorpion and the Frog' pattern we have learned to defend against, so we must be patient. Microsoft will destroy search for us again, scorpions just can't resist their nature.
Because Microsoft has a very long track record with its useless search products. Back in the XP days we learned to abstract ourselves from Microsoft's search incompetence by using alternatives. Not sure if filelocatorlite is still any good because my installers go back to 2012, but the older versions find everything without fuss and without spying on its users, there was zero telemetry in the 2012 installers. The older versions even have a regX search for both files and contents.
https://www.mythicsoft.com/filelocatorlite/download/
Though MS search might for now prioritize local results, I suspect every search location + search-term will be sent to Microsoft's servers for logging, along with your unique machine ID. Thus, adding to Microsoft's ever expanding profile of your digital life. I don't use Win 11 and never will (I barely use Win 10 iot for work), but a simple network analysis might prove this out. To do so, you won't even need wireshark or a firewall tcpdump. Just position yourself near your switch and watch the switch blink pattern. When you click "search", I'd be wiling to wager the next round on me, that you will reliably note switch light activity. This happens with a lot of MS product, which is an indicator your box needs further blocking. Extra credit if you note the switch blink pattern matches your typing. If it does, more than likely, it is Microsoft running a keystroke logger in this product.
A well setup OS emits near zero network activity until the user calls on a network resource. Near zero is possible even with Windows, but requires more effort compared to the many more privacy respecting OSes. And don't get me wrong, I love the older versions of Windows and will always use the three OSes I love: a locked down Windows 7 SP1 with near zero updates, BSD (the best OS ever), and Debian. But after Win 7, Microsoft has not produced an OS worthy of effort to control.
