People act like it sudden was broken in Windows 11 when in reality it never worked correctly in 7, 8, 8.1, or 10 either. Instead of fixing it, they've only made it worse. It seems like nobody in Microsoft works on core stuff anymore.
If I search for “foo”, I’d like to get all files containing “foo” please, without a shadow of a doubt that some files were skipped, including those that I have recently created. I still can’t get that as of Windows 11!
It would be easy to have your cake and eat it too. Have the file search default to the index. Allow frustrated users to then click a button that says "search harder" which would initiate the full enumeration of the relevant filesystems. Of course some UX professional will tell me I'm wrong, they don't like anything they didn't think of themselves.
I can't put my finger on what's going on exactly; there seems to be some design choice commonly made, that makes search behave (or appear) inconsistently to the point you can't really trust it to be exhaustive. I.e. "if I search for term 'foo' and it finds nothing, it means 'foo' thing is not on file". It's a fundamental guarantee search systems should deliver, but these days most don't. Without this guarantee, I always seek out means to manually walk the resource catalog (e.g. filesystem tree).
I do remember it sucking on previous versions. I did use winaero tweaker to turn off the web results (and many other annoyances).