from a technical perspective, how did windows manage to make a search function which does not work? like i just don't understand it. brute force going through file names with no cache would be better and faster! is it cache issues? going through binary files which aren't text and string matching? - ThreadSky

lorenschmidt.bsky.social • 6 days ago

from a technical perspective, how did windows manage to make a search function which does not work?

like i just don't understand it. brute force going through file names with no cache would be better and faster!

is it cache issues? going through binary files which aren't text and string matching?

Comments

trist.am•6 days ago

I think it must have been optimised for searching floppy disks, and they’ve never got around to rewriting it…

theaberdie.bsky.social•6 days ago

I have oft noted that for decades. It is their special power.
Like Google not *really* supporting Boolean NAND. But just sorta doing it. That must be a skill.

bobbydigitales.anderberg.co.uk•6 days ago

Are there open source or small companies making good replacements?

garettbass.com•6 days ago

https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

This is the spotlight equivalent for Windows

lorenschmidt.bsky.social•6 days ago

it looks like in windows there's a hotkey to launch it- is there also a way to quickly search a folder? or do you need to paste a path in from explorer to do that?

garettbass.com•6 days ago

I don’t actually use it, sorry 😅

bobbydigitales.anderberg.co.uk•6 days ago

The macos one works great. It's a revelation. Also it's such a comically simple problem to solve on a modern computer. Search 1 million strings, searching 10 million should also be instant!

lorenschmidt.bsky.social•6 days ago

yeah it actually should just work. it's a solved problem.

bobbydigitales.anderberg.co.uk•6 days ago

Here's some source code that can insert 100M rows into an sqlite database in 23 seconds so they can make a database with 1B rows. https://github.com/avinassh/fast-sqlite3-inserts

garyyoungiii.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's 25 year old legacy code so who knows

salade331.bsky.social•6 days ago

It has to do with NTFS being old and band. The OS doesn't build any indexes to search through files.

I really recommend https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/

derpythecalamity.bsky.social•6 days ago

i know how we put a man on the moon

but i will never understand how microsoft made it's search feature so worthless

i actually had to download a different file search tool because it's so bad

unusacies.bsky.social•6 days ago

It's not a functionality thing sadly, from my understanding the devs were told to change the software, as companies are from time to time, bloatware and the likes... and its kind of hard to change a search function, so they tried to make it search beyond the computer and ended up making it useless.

lorenschmidt.bsky.social•6 days ago

search... beyond the computer! it sounds so amazing out of context haha.

so they tried to build on the idea of eg falling back on a web search if a start menu string doesn't match applications, settings etc.?

unusacies.bsky.social•6 days ago

I believe thats the idea... you can search "uninstall" for example and it shows you "add and remove a program" so in that way it understands the context of your search... but it fails more times than it does not, and the regular simple in file search that is available is more useful to me...

unusacies.bsky.social•6 days ago

I understand the conceptual utility of a search function that gets what you are searching for beyond written words... but I dont feel its right for the windows operating system search bar to begin digging the internet (no longer windows) for what I was searching within my computer's harddrive(s) lol

lorenschmidt.bsky.social•6 days ago

in win 11 my explorer windows don't show any options at all, just 'search in [folder name]'. how do you do a basic search in files instead? my settings don't include that.

unusacies.bsky.social•6 days ago

I have the blessing of being in windows 10 still... though I hear Ctrl+F still lets you search within the explorers windows (like inside a selected folder)

unusacies.bsky.social•6 days ago

A quick, I guess nerdy, note: the visual interface we use in windows is THE "windows explorer" from individual windows to the files insides, etc... if you open up task manager and turn off explorer youll lose access to those for example, then running (windows key + R) "explorer" puts it back on

lorenschmidt.bsky.social•6 days ago

ha yeah the start menu search switching to a web search is so silly, especially because it insists on using edge every time which i never use.

zendarva.bsky.social•6 days ago

I regularly drop to bash on my windows machine to use find. The bash version, that works.

prairiewest.net•6 days ago

I think is works as designed, just not as we desire

paulodle.bsky.social•6 days ago

Windows search seems to have gotten worse over the years. Agree it is not good. For anyone looking for something else, this is really great. https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/

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