Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 189 posts

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#71

Post by macleginn »

whoopdedo wrote: post #4
Ididntdothis wrote: post #3

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 ty…

Windows is not the only culprit here: https://imgur.com/gallery/GlmEheS

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#72

Post by chairmanwow1 »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #3

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.

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#73

Post by Shank »

nocturnial wrote: post #52
Multicomp wrote: post #14

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 g…

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.

Everything is a search engine, not at all related to O&O shutup.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#74

Post by thebruce87m »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #48
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…

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 le…

5. Never anything on the web

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#75

Post by rado »

chairmanwow1 wrote: post #72
Ididntdothis wrote: post #3

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.

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 understa…

The Mac gets a lot of flak and macOS is indeed riddled with bugs, but there can be no comparison to the dumpster fire that is Windows.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#76

Post by porker »

1wd wrote: post #69
porker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hadn't heard of it until now, taking a look. Thanks.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#77

Post by ComodoHacker »

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…

>the same input produces the same set in the same order, every single time or it’s useless

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#78

Post by qalmakka »

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…

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#79

Post by badsectoracula »

0x8BADF00D wrote: post #68
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 conta…

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.

Re: Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure

#80

Post by jotm »

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…

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.
Post reply on HN