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Comment by Moeg | Hacker News Reader

Windows 10 search function is completely broken, it won't even find a program that's in start menu, not sure if it's because I disabled all the online functionality of search. If I want to find something online instead of my computer I use a browser. Thankfully there are great alternatives for the atrocity, such as Everything, it's mind-blowing how a third party program is orders of magnitude faster than native system search.

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It was broken - very broken, so broken that you had to enter the exact text of the thing you wanted.

It was that way for years, but at some point recently they finally seem to have fixed it - I can now enter the start, end, or just part of anything I want to find, and it finds it! You know, the bare minimum you'd expect from a search function!

I'm actually a big fan of Windows 10, but it boggles the mind how long they left such a key part of the Windows experience in such a sorry state.

If you disable “Background Apps” in Settings, Windows 10 will “helpfully” disable indexing (backed by Cortana service?) as well, rendering your index completely stale, which manifests as items in start menu don’t show, apps deleted a year ago still show, etc. All the garbage “solutions” when you search for this problem online don’t help at all. This problem once wasted me hours.

Dang. I thought you may have inadvertently pointed me in the right direction as to why I can't even get my indexing service to start. But, no luck. Maybe I'll get around to putting more hours in to fixing it someday.

One of the reasons I won't switch from macOS to Windows 10 for work is how bad search is and the lack of a proper launcher like Alfred.

It's absurd that Apple came up with Spotlight in 10.4 (15 years ago) and Microsoft still hasn't caught up with such a fundamental game changer.

See Power Toys Run

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

I've seen that one and others (eg: Wox), but nowhere near as powerful as Alfred. For example, you can't even just get folders.

There's an issue open here about this:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/issues/3347

When I worked for a consultant to Microsoft in the early 2000s, they were excited about the powerful search features they were planning to deliver in Longhorn. But Apple beat them to market with Spotlight, and to my knowledge, search has never turned into a differentiating feature for Windows.

It's kind of crazy to think back to those conversations with Microsoft about their long-range plans. Some they have delivered well, like the transition to a subscription model for client applications. Some they have not, like native peer-to-peer social networking in the OS.

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