Why is windows search so god damn awful?

[aaradorn]

35% Of the time it takes me to a webpage provided by bing, 45% of the time it doesnt show me what I typed and the last percentages it shows a file with the same name before the actual setting. 

 

How can something so easy work so bad, have you ever tried searching for updates but instead of updates it says: Lets search online, it only fixes itself after you delete a few letters of the word update.

[samcool55]

Yup, wonderful windows search. Has been a problem for I think years now (some mysterious people say that it used to work at some point in time, what a magical time it must have been) and they refuse to fix it, for some reason.

 

It's awful because it's microsoft. Anything they made for the last few years was not absolute trash, but not great either, there was always a better alternative.

[GoldenLag]

5 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

what a magical time it must have been

Still works for me somehow. On both my 1803 machine and 1903 machine. 

[Murasaki]

5 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Yup, wonderful windows search. Has been a problem for I think years now (some mysterious people say that it used to work at some point in time, what a magical time it must have been) and they refuse to fix it, for some reason.

 

It's awful because it's microsoft. Anything they made for the last few years was not absolute trash, but not great either, there was always a better alternative.

Micro "good enough" soft

[TechyBen]

I think it needs to index first... might explain why it does not work on WAN show (work laptops and constant new installs?) and it did on a friends where I tried to demonstrate it. XD

 

Or it's shows which laptop has the FBI tracker in... the working search has the tracker.

[GoodBytes]

8 hours ago, aaradorn said:

35% Of the time it takes me to a webpage provided by bing, 45% of the time it doesnt show me what I typed and the last percentages it shows a file with the same name before the actual setting. 

 

How can something so easy work so bad, have you ever tried searching for updates but instead of updates it says: Lets search online, it only fixes itself after you delete a few letters of the word update.

I honestly never had an issue. That said, I don't "customize" Windows, like some do (ie: randomly disabling services without actually knowing what they do, or use some software that promise to do something but the creator of said software doesn't know what he talking about). I am not saying that you did any of this, just mentioning my setup.

 

Of course, needs to do its indexing... so for example, if you just installed Windows, and never let it idle, then Indexing won't happen, or not fully complete it (as it stops on idle). By default, Windows does maintenance task at 2am. See Security & Maintenance panel > Maintenance to see what time it does the process and to customize it to your needs.

 

You also must remember that the Start Menu search, by default, only indexes the 2x Start Menu folder (local user and all users), as well as Document, Music, Picture, etc folders under your user name. It doesn't search anything outside, unless specified. So if you save documents, say, in C:\Super Important Documents\ it won't find it. If you run a program from the executable and not have a Start Menu shortcut, it won't find it either.

 

If you suspect that for some reason the Index is corrupted, you can rebuild it by opening the Indexing Options panel, then go "Advanced", and hit the "Rebuild" button. Be sure that the path of the index (mentioned bellow the button) is also correct. If you moved OS between drives, it might be pointing to a destination that doesn't exists and thing might be screwed up.