It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engine, and Microsoft has resisted that, for some mysterious reason, for 30+ years.
There's HoudahSpot [1] for something a little more advanced. Third party launchers like Alfred [2] can also perform file searches.
So far I would recommend that one, it has tons of new features (including a change journal that shows renames, moves and deletes in real time) and I didn't experience a single bug yet. And it is even faster.
The idea of an indexing service is good though. KDE's Baloo faces similar issues. It's not that easy to make it a good experience.
Everything (mentioned in this thread) comes closest to being fast, reliable, and usable. It can even index external disks and search them while offline.
For some reason its accuracy has dropped in recent years but in the Tiger days it was really good.
How else would they trick you into opening and using Edge, the best web browser in the whole wide world?
/s
But it seems like shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun.
The idea was that you could search this:
> the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month
They had hyped this up as coming in Project Longhorn (which was eventually split into Vista and salvaged in Windows 7), but the new filesystem was eventually dropped like their other attempts:
I don't need or want anything fancy like semantic searching. I just want to be able to grep and find things by filename.
It supported plugins and was reasonably fast. Needed a lot of RAM though and some admin to babysit it.