Windows Search

Another one of the features that Microsoft is really pushing is the their new "instant" search with it's alleged tight integration into the rest of the system.

The premise is pretty useful, you type what you want into a box and it magically appears so you can select it whether it be a document, program, song, whatever you wish. It's brought up by pressing the Windows key (usually between CTRL and ALT) and is the default item in the Start menu.

I'm not going into the technical details of how it works and I'll sum up how well it works by just saying "not very well". Really. It feels slow, clunky, and doesn't find everything - more on that in a moment.

Here's the biggest issue I have with it. When you search for something, say "phone number" above you can do nothing else until the search is complete and you select what you want. What? Yes, if you click off the start menu or go to anything else, it disappears and your search is gone. However long the search takes, that's how long you're sitting there.

Think a few seconds isn't long? Just sit there and stare at the period at the end of this sentence and count to five. Don't forget to say Mississippi.

This is not how I work. On Google Desktop Search, or in a browser, or wherever I search from I can enter what I want and go to something else while it does it's looking. The results sit there until I'm done with it.

Making me sit and wait for the search results is simply inexcusable.

To make matters worse, it's not a very good search engine - so the time you spend sitting there staring at the screen may not yield what you're looking for even though it does exist. Here's a small example from when I was trying to solve my "Why won't Office update?" problem.

I needed to find a specific file - mapisvc to be precise. I typed it into the box on the Start menu and got nothing. So I tried the other search on the Start menu, no idea why that's there - how many Searches do I need?

Joy. File not found. And for you technical folk, I did change the areas that Search indexes so that it looked at the whole computer. By default Search only searches Documents and a few other places. My guess is that it's so slow they didn't want to cripple it out of the gate.

But I know the file exists, because I eventually gave up and hunted it down by hand…

I've selected it for you so you can see where it is.

Brand new fangled search - 0; Searching old school by hand - 1

Confidence in new search - none.

I did eventually get search to find a copy of this file:

Here's a bonus question for all you out there.  If found the file - but where is it located?