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Comment by Plasmoid | Hacker News Reader

The default search in windows is so broken. I'd type in a filename, if find it, but before I could click on it it would be replaced by stupid web search crap.

I had to go into the registry to turn off websearch.

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Windows search has been broken for a _long_ time. Agent Ransack¹ is one of the first things I add to a fresh Windows install. Soon after some unix-a-like ports go on too (usually via cygwin) so I can use find, grep, and friends. For filename based search on NTFS volumes, WizFile² is useful too as it scans the MTF instead of navigating the directory structure bit-by-bit which can be significantly faster no matter how modern your local drives are.

This is the main reason I don't bother even trying Bing – if they can screw up local file search this much, how useful can their global search really be?

[1] https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

[2] https://antibody-software.com/wizfile/

"Everything" is another good option, at least from my basic usage of it.

https://www.voidtools.com/faq/#what_is_everything

Keypirinha (a launcher) works well with Everything. Both are free. The former hasn’t been updated for a few years, but it still works for launching applications, performing quick calculations, currency conversion, etc.

[1]: https://keypirinha.com/

I might give that a try. When I need to search for a file on windows I've gone back to using using DIR /s <filename>

How did you do this?

https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/disable-windows-web-sear...

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