Skepticism after Windows 10 search failure
forbes.com
forbes.com
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 my favorite: sometimes it finds multiple things but only after a delay, meaning that just as I hit Enter the top hit changes and I end up opening something entirely unintentional (bonus points if the mistaken choice is something that takes longer to launch, freezing the machine).
They need: (1) stability in the UI (never mess with something once it is highlighted), and (2) stability in the lookup (the same input produces the same set in the same order, every single time or it’s useless).
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 leads to an .exe that's likely to be the main program file
4) Anything else
I LIKE Windows 10, but that particular "feature" is a no go for me.
It loses your input, it baits-and-switches, it opens completely irrelevant software (often uninstallers that immediately begin an uninstall process or never-used settings pages), some applications are plain missing from there and have to be accessed through the application menu always.
Features? Surely, you mean these kind of bugs? :)
I start typing "Code", by the time "Cod" is typed, I see VS Code and want to press enter, before I realize that, I get done typing the "e" and out of nowhere "code.bat" (whatever that is) appears and gets executed.
Stable at a PoS level.
Windows search is the worst part about Windows 10 for me and I have no idea how anyone ever thought it was at a better than some pre-alpha stage. All the different updates do, are make it behave in new utterly dumb ways.
Luckily Keypiranha means I rarely ever need it.
(Honestly though I'm pretty happy with it, it's good enough that I never miss the old-fashioned Start menu like I expected to.)
There are literally dozens of third party search/launch apps that are better.
I don’t know what kind of matching it uses but it’s not good. Is it prefix only? Is it case sensitive? What metadata is used in the match (what is displayed as a program name or something else)?
If I started writing a simple indexer app with an SQLite file and a little search box I’d have something more useful for finding apps after one afternoon.
So what exactly is the Windows search trying to do that I’m not considering, that makes it so hard that it fails with the trivial stuff like text matching?
Q -> nothing
Qg/Qg -> Qgis
QGi -> nothing
Qgis -> websearch
bit -> Bitlocker
bitt -> qBittorrent (yay!)
bitto to bittorent -> web search
Then, i tried searching again, and it comes up, 3rd time lucky.. Doesn't make sense at all!
Do you see the same issue when disconnected from the web?
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.
Order should change, but if I type "Ble" I would like Blender (the only entry I ever selected after typing "Ble" to come first and not some random file I never ever opened manually.
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.
++This. Does the essentials such as real time [NTFS] drive monitoring from journals, small memory footprint, presents an accessible and responsive cancel dialogue when a operation will require lots of STATs (like sort many files by size), and has good boolean operators and semi-smart parsing of search lines and Bingo, ""quotes, optionally includes paths, stores file class (audio, video, doc etc) in short-index.
For full content search with several viewers and "jump to it and see" preview -- but only for selected document folders, I use DocFectcher. Matching files are presented in a windowpane you can further sort by relevance or -Date (my default), name or size. Reindexing is not done in real time when you change or add files but a small process watches indexed folders and just saves flags of what changes so index update can happen quickly when the main program is run.
As an example, say I have records related to my taxes - a bunch of documents and images - organized into directories by year, and I want to copy all of the images for the last 5 years out into a temporary directory so that I can flip through them easily. I can browse to my taxes directory, do a search for "kind:picture" then sort the results by modified date and drag the relevant items into the destination directory.
For some types of tasks this is so convenient that sometimes when I'm ssh'd into a server on my home network I'll move files into a mounted network share so that I can manipulate them from Windows Explorer. Clicking around a graphical file explorer is just way less cognitive overhead than stringing together a big command on the command line. Windows Explorer in the Windows 10 era isn't great, but it's much better than e.g. Finder or Thunar, which are my other options on my home computers.
I have a lot of ebooks on my computer (> 10000). One problem with organising books and other PDFs is that sometimes they fall into multiple categories. (Should a new scientific article on lucid dreaming go into 'brain and cognitive science' or 'meditation' or 'hypnosis' or 'sleep' or 'self improvement'?) I could dump each new file into the directory representing the first category that comes to mind and make symbolic links from directories referring to other categories, but in the end the number of categories is practically endless. Search is in practice the only workable solution.
Calibre has nice search by 'title:', 'author:', and 'vl:' but eventually it has still the same problem of endless categorisation.
Manual classification is still useful to classify documents according to labels that are not present as strings in the books' contents though.
Folders work. Tags can work. Search can work. The frankenstein folder-search monster that is windows 10 used as designed - that simply doesn't work for anybody.
In general, I find it very hard to believe this is a people few users rely on. It's the primary way to launch programs for me.
Google maps is another product where useful features are regularly broken by 'improvements'.
https://windowsforum.com/threads/windows-7-file-search-index...
Some of my scientific instruments are decades old and I like to be able to search back quite a number of years compared to most offices.
It's worth the effort to be the most reliable and repeatable you can get.
I don't like search to be slow or questionable, and of course it needs to return the same results from the same archive every time.
And indexing is not helpful, I usually want to search within every file.
Using a 2GHz processor with adequate memory and identical HDD, with no indexing and background services minimized, Best performance was found with W95, then W98, then Wxp, all on FAT32 volumes.
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x not acceptable.
On a modern 2GHz multicore processor and adequate memory and identical HDD (but different than above), with no indexing and background services minimized, Best performance is found with Wxp on FAT32 volumes. _its nice to know W9x would help out in this situation if really needed
Wxp on NTFS, not so good.
NT6.x less acceptable than ever.
.
The good thing about Google search was when it would return the same first-page results for anyone anywhere until something different had newly gained higher ranking among everyone altogether.
Going back a lot further, the promise of TV without commercial interruption was so long overdue it was wonderfully realized decades earlier in the 1970's by your friendly neighborhood cable TV company. That's why a private content-providing network was installed to premises to begin with, having better bandwidth than the original communication lines from the phone company monopoly.
Maybe they are all just trying to improve shareholder results through time at the expense of customer results, the old-fashioned way.
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.
Searching everything takes lots of time, searching through an indexed database takes less than a second. When in windows I use a locate-port[1] that I use to index any local disks as well as remote network shares of interest. It would take about an hour to search everything.
But an hour wouldn't be that bad, the problem arises when you are not quite sure what you are looking for. Getting the response back instantaneous is invaluable because you can refine your search in seconds.
And instantaneous results mean nothing if they're worthless. I'd rather let you turn on indexing because you need it and it matches your use case. Leave the other 99% alone.
Windows default was ok but slow in XP and absolutely unusable since. Any benefit to search would be a massive benefit to millions of people.
Doesn't have to be indexed but would certainly help. I guess SSDs are quick enough many times but it is absolutely essential if a regular hard drive is in the picture.
okay, ...
> and their string contents on the system
... why would you even do that? ls-lR.gz works. And that’s exactly what people wants 80% of time.
There's a bunch of articles online on how to do it, eg:
https://www.windowslatest.com/2020/02/05/its-not-just-you-wi...
Basically have to set HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\BingSearchEnabled to 0
and
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search\CortanaConsent to 0
However, I agree with you, that I would've preferd this to be turned off by default. Extra dependencies that bring no extra value are net negative, as seen in there current case where a server-side problem stopped my local search from working.
Good job, Microsoft.
I think I can agree. But the push by all browsers seems to be more search. Not less.
You can even install (and write your own) plugins for it, e.g. a calculator plugin.
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 get us back to the baseline of Windows 7, that does not bode well for them.
It's a convenience tool. If you look up everything you can do it all manually.
dang: I'm done with this bullshit, it's ok to delete my account.
Every time I encounter this strange behavior in WIN10 -- I am so dumbstruck by it each time it still feels like it must have been a "glitch-in-the-matrix".
I mean, because no one would really release software like that, would they? At least not a multi-billion software behemoth like MS? Right? </sarc>
It happens because someone doesn't understand that search rankings vs. queries have to have a 'smooth' solution, and thinks they can tweak a few weightings here and there to get the results they think are 'correct' for the very specific cases they have in mind, without realising that this has a knock-on effect on the entire scoring space and you get odd singularities and stuff popping up as a result.
The people in question should not be touching anything even distantly related to a computer in any professional context.
Could be that they were forced to change it at the 11th hour just before Windows 10 was being demo'd and it was never changed back. Could be a committee decision. Could be the programmer hated the surveillance installed by MS and so deliberately made the search bad.
I'd bet the engineer was listening to the 'someone' saying things like 'why don't you just' or 'it just needs to do this', or other things including the word 'just'.
I'd bet the engineer tried to explain the realities of how this stuff works, to 'someone' who's job didn't involve understanding what they were asking for, and reacted by demanding with the word 'just' instead of pretending to ask.
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.
They don't get to claim that it's a harder problem than indexing a hard disk without first explaining why they think they should retain the use of their fingers for continuing to send search terms over a network after I, as the owner of the hardware and 'owner' of the OS instance have made a concerted effort to turn that shit off.
> 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...
How much data does the Start Menu search have to index, total? A few 100KB? Something like that. This is assuming a fresh install, no documents, no third party apps.
A modern CPU can simply brute force through that amount of data and perform nearly arbitrary subtext matching, without any fancy indexing techniques, in something like a handful of microseconds. Even in an absolute worst-case of cross-process pointer chasing out into uncached main memory, you're talking a few tens of milliseconds, max.
Yet, a fresh install of any version of Windows, including Server editions, simply flat out fails to find control panel items or shortcuts even if their names are typed exactly. Many hours later it'll find some of them, not necessarily all. Days later, perhaps it'll reach a 100% match, but that's certainly not guaranteed.
For me, often having to use freshly installed Windows VMs, I see a nearly 100% failure rate for this component.
It's just absurd that this passed QA.
Seriously though, have you checked out the search in O365? It is starting to get really good and wait till you see how this progresses in the next couple of years.
I think I’ll be proven right. :-)
I used to find this aggravating but it’s better to accept it and move on.
I have to fix (or just deal with the fact that I cannot do anything about it) just as many things that break or go wrong with Windows as I do with Linux.
Hacking around with the registry is just that. A hack job to roughly get Windows to behave until the next update breaks it.
At least on Linux you have the whole system open to you and can roll back changes or apply patches with much more control.
However we are in a thread about how Windows 10 search just up an broke and whose only permanent fix is to disable part of it in the registry.
The search function barely works compared to alternatives too.
People can absolutely stick with Windows but I was referring to people who argue that they cannot try alternatives because they don't "just work" and you have use a command line and do all this configuration stuff.
I have less problems on Linux and most of them are of my own creation, trying to run software in wine or use hardware with non-free drivers.
It helps to adapt to doing things the Linux way when using Linux instead of contiuing to operate in a Windows mindset.
Fair enough, but your argumentation still sounds like 'works for me so it's all fine' which is the main point I was addressing. I.e. it's not because you have less problems on linux that others do as well, and hence they could make a rather valid argument that they gave up trying. Which doesn't mean all people complaining like that are right of course. It's never so black/white.
Gaming, support, decades of technical debt, and familiar user interfaces/workflows for non-technical users.
Support: I've never had Windows support be successful. The helpers, wizzards, and online support has misdiagnosed or been unable to fix every issue I've had. For Linux, there are massive, friendly, knowledgeable communities, thorough documentation, and if all else fails, Stack Overflow.
Technical debt: I can't think of a Windows application I needed that hasn't had a similar FOSS application (if that was what you meant)
User interfaces: other than the Windows Start Menu, vanilla Ubuntu seems pretty familiar and intuitive coming from Windows, from what I remember when I switched.
Of course this is mostly subjective! But I think that Linux had so many years of clunkiness that it has a technical stigma to the average windows user. I've had friends and relatives switch recently after getting fed up by "Windows is now updating your PC at a very inconvenient time, for 3 hours", and overall have been happy with the switch.
For support/tech debt I'm talking about enterprise. There is some out there but it's not so much for your daily users. FOSS exists for stuff like word, but excel (not your casual spreadsheets, I mean full on enterprise applications hacked together in excel), a business's ERP or CRM interface of choice (although this is mostly in the browser afaiui), the tons of legacy apps that need IE to function... yea. It's changing, but it's not great. And no one cares about mailing lists and online communities for support.
In terms of UI, most graphical shells don't pass the grandma test. The default icons are horrible, the workflow is completely alien to people used to one way of doing things, and that's bad for casual users. Yes they can get over it, but they can also just use windows like they do at school and work.
Basically it comes down to the fact the things average folks use windows for work great and they're familiar with it and need to use it at work or wherever. With linux they have no idea what distros to install, or how to do it on their machines that came with windows and don't have easy ways of moving their existing files to their new Linux box. There's just no incentives to use Linux for the average person.
I say this as an ardent Linux user at home and work. I know how great it is, but I don't pretend that it makes sense for my dad who's been on Windows forever or my mom who's been on Mac forever.
Ah, yeah, enterprise level applications are another beast. I'm currently dealing with maintenance and upgrade of legacy VB6 motion control systems at work, and there's just no way any of it can be ported out of Windows (2000).
I somewhat disagree about the Grandma test (at least for going from Windows to Linux; macOS has a very different feel). What do most causal users do with a PC? What I've observed is maybe 60% web browsing, 20% documentation, 20% media. Ubuntu comes with a drop in browser, drop in spreadsheet/text editor, and automatically launched media players. Discoverability is an issue, because none of these applications have exactly the same names, but Ubuntu's Window Key search function is smart enough to find these drop-ins with even vague search terms. With that ability, I'm arguing that the workflow for casual users is very similar, with a minor learning curve for new names and icons.
Windows works great for casual users until: Windows update kicks in, Windows encounters a vague error, Windows unified search stops working (or fails to find files they know are there), or some application won't work for some unknown reason.
Any technology you are familiar with will seem more familiar than any that you aren't; I get that argument. But at the same time, people are capable of learning new things, and they already learned Windows from scratch. It took effort for me to learn how to use Windows, same as other OS's. And with Linux laptops starting to become more of a thing, we're going to see fewer people who's first OS is either Mac or Windows (unfortunately it seems like it's becoming more and more Android or iOS)
I would like the start menu search to be confined to the programs installed on the computer. To search settings make me click the 'cog' first. To search for files there is Explorer, which is already better at the job. To search the web I will use Firefox to access a search engine.
Wouldn't that be simpler?
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 it to see where stuff and settings that were obvious and easy to find before are now hidden.
It's a shame it's no longer developed.
Compare this to stuff like Everything..
Microsoft used their OS monopoly to destroy Netscape. Not sure if it will work today since they don't dominate the smartphone space.
Even if this were a plot against Google, it would simply be bog-standard competition. It has absolutely none of the characteristics of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
Firefox, linux, open source. It's really funny how a lot of open source projects are hosted in github.
Edit, Links: http://www.wox.one https://www.voidtools.com
All other things - in particular file search - are much more comfortable with Total Commander, a software providing a sophisticated consistent interface for more than 20 years now, superseding any Windows versions internal abilities easily (including the whole explorer functionality).
Still thinking of buying Alfred but I'm undecided. Have you tried it?
Currently using SwiftSearch with very fast results, as it reads directly from the NTFS MFT. No databases, no indexing, no background processes or services. There's also UltraSearch that works with the same idea but is more polished.
I had never heard of Everything but just downloaded it and tried it. It is fast! I typed in YYYY-MM-DD for a few different dates. I have never used OneDrive, do not want to use OneDrive and wish I could uninstall OneDrive. OneDrive creates ~10 new files every day.
The broken (now fixed but still stupid) search is just a symptom of a bloated quantity-over-quality, walled-garden, rented-not-owned, OSaaS.
Specifically: I type ope and the top of the list is Skype, then the Opera folder, then Office. When I add an r then About Your PC is at the top. then opera.pak, and at last Opera. But even if I type Opera the hit I expect is still not at the top of the list.
With Keypirinha it remembers which one I choose and promotes it to the top.
And that was before Search stopped working. If I didn't need SQL Server and Visual Studio for the work I do I would not have Windows on any of my own hardware.
Edit: Of course there are some exceptions like apple maps
I miss Ubuntu (minus their amazon scandal...)
Been a macOS user since the start of my career, but I have been enjoying Windows 10 LTSC
Fast, doesn't rely on fragile indexing, and finds stuff Microsoft always seems to miss.
This incident doesn't actually show any local files being sent to MS, however. Online search can be disable with a registry entry, which proves that the online service is not necessary for searching local files. It's far more likely that a connection error for the bing search is just triggering some bug that then prevents local results from being shown.