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Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

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Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#61

Post by dreamcompiler »

Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#62

Post by netsharc »

chapium wrote: post #45
Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

What is the alternative? Mac does the exact same with spotlight.

I use FARR: https://www.donationcoder.com/software/mouser/popular-apps/f... (I assume in works in Windows 10, I'm still on Windows 7.

You can even install (and write your own) plugins for it, e.g. a calculator plugin.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#63

Post by nmfisher »

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#64

Post by jodrellblank »

desc wrote: post #47

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 ind…

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.

[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#65

Post by porker »

orev wrote: post #55
blondin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

Sounds like Launchy

I still use Launchy on Windows 10, alongside the native search. The plugins Launchy has like for Putty integration make it invaluable.

It's a shame it's no longer developed.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#66

Post by tasogare »

mthoms wrote: post #50
makecheck wrote: post #33

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 m…

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?

Why would servers be involved in local search? But this raises a good point: mixing local and web search by default is stupid and confusing as well.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#67

Post by 1wd »

chapium wrote: post #45
Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

What is the alternative? Mac does the exact same with spotlight.

Wox (Windows Omni eXecutor) "is a launcher for Windows that simply works", open source, plugins for searching other things

https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#68

Post by 0x8BADF00D »

nmfisher wrote: post #63

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…

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#69

Post by 1wd »

porker wrote: post #65
orev wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Launchy

I still use Launchy on Windows 10, alongside the native search. The plugins Launchy has like for Putty integration make it invaluable. It's a shame it's no longer developed.

Have you tried Wox? https://github.com/Wox-launcher/Wox

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#70

Post by chairmanwow1 »

chapium wrote: post #45
Zanni wrote: post #5

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.

What is the alternative? Mac does the exact same with spotlight.

Spotlight is also blazingly fast
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