Comments on: Windows 7 File Search Indexing Options

By: escoville

escoville — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:49:48 +0000

I cannot understand what all the moaning is about. I have just acquired Windows 7, which has its faults, admittedly, but Search is not one of them. In XP, what did you do? You put in a word contained in the file, and started Search. It gave you an accurate result, but might take 10 minutes to search your disk if you couldn’t specify the folder more precisely. So you installed Google Desktop, which found everything very quickly (incl. emails, which the Explorer search didn’t touch). However, it took up a lot of disk space (and disks were smaller then). So you then de-installed that, and went on to install Windows Search 4.0, which worked well enough, but seemed to be constantly indexing (and of course only worked for what it had indexed, so you still had to use the Explorer Search sometimes).

The Windows Search on Windows 7, once you’ve got it to index the folders where you actually keep your files (probably not Libraries, whatever Microsoft thinks), finds anything in milliseconds, including emails. It only takes about 20 minutes to index a whole HD. I’ve tried it on some fairly abstruse things, and it hasn’t let me down yet. You must of course tell it to index the right things, which is a nuisance, certainly, and not for total greenhorns. But otherwise, I fail to see the problem.

By: Charli

Charli — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:55:37 +0000

If anyone writes a program that will search win 7 like win xp I’ll buy it. I’m so sick of win 7.

By: Charli

Charli — Tue, 15 May 2012 20:53:00 +0000

I have to disagree with you. the search in win xp was great. It was easy to use and easy to learn. Win 7 search SUCKS. You shouldn’t have to search the web to learn how to use a search option.

By: David

David — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 18:05:15 +0000

Well, I have read three-quarters of the comments here after being incredibly frustrated by fruitless searches using the search box immediately above the Start button.

But this is clearly not the way to Search in Win 7! As suggested above, visit Control Panel > Folder options and enable searching in Public Folders. Then go to Control Panel > Indexing Options and using “modify” add your drives or other locations, and then go make a cup of coffee while your computer indexes everything in those drives or other locations. My computer has indexed just over 46,000 items.

Here’s some good advice.

http://helpdeskgeek.com/windows-7/rebuild-windows…

Then learn to search by opening Explorer and going to the top-right corner. Type in a search term and, bang, very soon every document, every picture, anything with that search term will be listed with the search term highlighted in yellow, along with other details. Very impressive.

What I need to do now is go to the following page and learn how search more precisely, so I don’t get so many results!

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/help/…

By: JTB

JTB — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:24:50 +0000

Here’s my problem. I decided to index the folder containing essentially everything (docs, jpegs, ppt, pdfs) I use, creae or work on daily. It took half a day to complete the process, after which the entire folder vanished from C:/. I unhid the C:/ drive and eventually found my folder inside MSOCache, where it had been moved without my knowing it. My backup routines did not, of course, know where to find it, so I had to change the command arguments therein. Etcetera. I agree with anyone who finds the new indexing algorithms inferior to XP’s, which were clunky but at least not so confusing or invasive.

Is there any way, btw, to reverse this, restore my monster folder to its original location without reinstalling everything?