document search

I looked for previous posts on this subject, but they're old. I tried the suggestions in those posts, however, but they didn't help.

Sometimes the search box in windows explorer will find a document containing a word. Sometimes it won't, even when I know the document I'm looking for is somewhere in my documents file. The one thing it will not do is find a string of text. I know, from memory, that at one time, on my older computers, I could find any file at any time in an instant, just by typing in a string of text. This was invaluable to me. I might not remember the name of the document, but I could usually remember a few words that were in the document. I considered this an extremely valuable feature of windows. There was never a time when I couldn't call up a document based on a few words of text. Emphasis on "was never."

I can't do it any more. The file search does not work. How can I find a document by typing in a string of a few words?

I find the same (current Creators). Sometime it will find a string inside a word or pdf file, sometimes not. Sometimes it finds a file which does not include the string. My Indexing Options states "Indexing complete", and "Index these locaions" includes my document library (and other places). All the files types in Advanced > File Types are listed, including .docx and .pdf.

I investigated this before but none of the advice helped. Windows Ten's search clearly is unreliable. I never use it.

Is there other software that will actually do searches reliably?

Ticking this option may help within docs ? Contents excluded by default.

AndreyT said:

What exactly do you mean by "won't"? Does File Explorer explicitly tell you that there's no such document? Or does File Explorer keep searching, searching and searching for a very long time?

Note also that the search behavior is context-sensitive - it depends on what is selected in File Explorer tree. If you select a drive or a "regular" folder, it will simply search for file names. But if you select your designated "Documents" folder, it will search for text inside your documents.

Because of this it might be a better idea to use Win+S search instead of File Explorer search. Win+S seems to always look for your search term inside indexed documents.

I mean I get "no item matches your search" after it completes a long search in, eg., Documents.

I tried Win + S and so far it is 100% effective in finding items, including one 4 folder levels down, and one inside an Excell spreadsheet. It is lightning fast. Thanks for that. However, it does not offer the Pictures folder to search in. Curiously, it does offer the app "Photos" and it is also effective there, including images in my Pictures folder. I will use Win+S in future.

dalchina said:

Are you sure all the text in the pdf's in question is actually text, not image?
And do you have a pdf ifilter? It's not enough simply to see pdf listed, there must also be an ifilter present.


Installing an iflter requires rebuilding the index for it to be effective.

Note that changing your pdf viewer can remove the ifilter.
And you must have file explorer open at a point in the file tree higher than what you want to search for.

Note: Google Desktop search (obsolete,free) is still available, then there's Copernic Desktop Search and X1 (commercial).

GDS also had an Omnipage plugin that dealt with OCR for image based documents very well.

PDF is listed in the list you show in your post, but not iPDF. However, I seem to be getting better searches, as mentioned in my reply at #7. What is iPDF please? Where can I get it and where do I put it?

Stevekir said:

PDF is listed in the list you show in your post, but not iPDF. However, I seem to be getting better searches, as mentioned in my reply at #7. What is iPDF please? Where can I get it and where do I put it?

I too rely on searching for text snippets within pdf documents. Before Windows 8 you needed to install an extension (called an iFilter) to do this - I used the Adobe and then (at the time faster) Foxit filters to search for text strings in pdf.

In Windows 8 or 10 there is no need for these old programs any more - just make sure the "Index Properties and File Contents" is selected and use the default Reader Search Handler.



It works perfectly well.