Try `find / -iname "foo" 2>/dev/null`, works every time. Also can take quite some time.
Even if the db is not up to date, it's likely faster to update/search than rely on find
I find simple searches by file name useful, but that's also because I'm fairly diligent to keep my filesystems organized
The launcher called Albert is helpful as a sort of Spotlight stand-in with Linux (maybe elsewhere?). It does math, runs things, and can have things like a dictionary added. I believe it can also search
The demonstrations there confirm searching... and way more than I can do justice here
I also catfish https://launchpad.net/catfish-search which is excellent. Also can search within text files.
I install it through the Fedora repositories and only use the bundled extensions, so I don't worry too much about it
I also like WinDirStat a lot for Windows file management, which is not really for search but gives a great view of disk usage.
Actually, the secret sauce to both WizTree's and Everything's speed is the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) [1].
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/maste...
Have never been able to find anything.
Probably worth benchmarking against fzf/ripgrep when I can find the time.
SwiftSearch is excellent and uses the same tech: https://sourceforge.net/projects/swiftsearch/