Exactly, it's mostly busywork.
Google Maps and Windows Search are two products that have been over-worked to death. Both were better in older iterations (Windows Search pre-Vista, Google Maps before they went all minimalism-stupid).
Google Maps in particular stripped out tons of useful functionality for a long period (My Places seems to appear and disappear every second release, location search history is currently MIA, compass is gone, et al).
Windows Search just tried to make it "clever" but instead made it "unreliable." They wanted to add support for everyone file format one by one (and ignore everything else) but instead managed to only support native Microsoft formats well and nothing else at all. File Search in Windows (Vista-8.1) is horrendously poor. Give me Windows 95 search.
- Windows had an indexer long before Vista (many many years)[0].
- Windows Search supports (and supported) UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings, as well as unicode if you had the correct language pack installed.
- Windows supported file content searches in Windows 95 (up through Vista).
- Microsoft could have allowed plugins to enrich search results WITHOUT gutting raw text searching (see Windows XP for a compromise, before they removed the work-around in Vista).