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Comment by fbdab103 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone please tell the Windows Start Menu designers? Have completely ruined the experience as it constantly juggles items as its heuristics are seemingly updated. I especially enjoy how Bing results get prioritized over local applications and files.

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I cannot figure out how "upd" shows Windows Update but "update" does not.

I realized the other day "stor" brings up Photos as the first result. I'm dumbfounded.

That can be desirable if the filesystem path to Photos includes a directory named something like "storage". Of course it should still prioritize apps that actually have "stor" in the name, but maybe you didn't have any?

No - Microsoft Store was installed. And what I was looking for. (To see the new WSL GUI app.)

But most of all it doesn’t seem to be deterministic. Very often I get a different behavior on the second attempt.

Search in windows puzzles me. Like I don’t get why it takes so long to search files in explorer, while traversing the same folder structure programmatically takes milliseconds. Hard computer science problem!

I think search in windows makes a stab at searching content as well, and not just straight text. This means unpacking zips, loading excel files etc.

But, yeah, it sucks.

I am not even sure it's the case. In explorer options, search, both "include compressed files" and "always search file names and content" are unchecked by default. And from the behaviour it seems to only search file names indeed.

I suspect it has more to do to explorer registering something with the file system to be notified if any of the folders being searched change or something like that. Something completely useless in any case, I'd much rather it doesn't do anything smart and gives me a result instantaneously.

If you don't have it already, I'll shill for the excellent tool "Everything" by voidtools. This is a must-have for me on any new Windows install.

> I cannot figure out how "upd" shows Windows Update but "update" does not.

This drives me crazy.

Users are spending more time in the Start Menu, and visit Bing more often: engagement metrics are up!

You're the product. I'm not sure they care what you think.

One can only hope that this thread finds a way onto some responsible MS employee monitor.

Yeah, MS is not good at search, but I think having one engineer tackle windows search for over all these years would have brought us instant and relevant search results.

How many times I have to find the right keyword to find something I KNOW is there but that satisfies the search engine is more than I want to recount.

The sane alternative is to use OpenShell.

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