Ms please bring back W8 search !!!

topgundcp said:

Whether it's Windows 7/8 or 10. I gave up using Windows search a long time ago so the first thing I do after installation is to turn off windows search which is a resource hog, disable search index. Instead I use: Everything Search Engine . It is a small program, takes only ~2MB of RAM to run and the icon is always on the taskbar. You'll get an instant result for what you looking for from all drives in your PC, right click on it will take you directly to the file location/copy path/run, double click to run if it is an excutable etc.... In addtion, you can use regex for pattern matching and to narrow the search.

That is OK if you are only searching for file names and not the contents. There is no feasible way of searching contents without maintaining large indexes.

For example I have about 45k (very small) program source files saved as text files. If I want to find all instances where a variable is changed (that is in which files) I need to search the contents. In this case I need the contents indexed - not just the file names. Windows search works very well for this and apart from a day or so after installing I don't find the overhead too large. I would prefer more granularity though so you could say whether certain indexes were maintained immediately when a file is changed or whether they were updated later asynchronously or even only when a search required them.

Search is misunderstood - people index their entire system and that is where the index grows to unmanageable size.

The checkbox on the drive properties page ALLOWS file content to be indexed, but nothing is actually stored in the DB until you change Indexing Options. The only content indices in the DB should be files you want to search content - basically the four categories docs/email, music, pics, vids.

Libraries add a bit of a wrinkle bc they automatically add folders to the search index. But Libraries are misunderstood too

It's easy enough to manage the Search index, but it's also a bit of a pain in the arse. I look at it every few months to see what might have been inadvertently added by me or an application - then make adjustments (removing extraneous folders from the index).

It took me a while to understand Search and I'm sure I still don't use all of it's capabilities. I'll have to see what Win10 offers - is it Bing desktop, is it Win7 search, is it a new search?????