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I would say Windows search pre-Vista was unusable in general due to the poor/non-existent indexing and poor support of non-ASCII formats or anything beyond basic file metadata. Microsoft's solution to the not being able to support every file-type under the sun was to allow plugins to provide new types, which work quite well IMO.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFilter

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I don't say this often but: Everything you just said is factually wrong.

- 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).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexing_Service

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