I NEVER get a result that has any relationship to what I’m looking for. Just now, for example, I searched for the word “congregational,” because I’m writing the history of a Congregational church and thus there are about a dozen user-created documents on my hard drive with that word in the name. What I got, though, was a listing of several dozen files, most of which do not have the word “congregational” either in the name or the text, including shortcuts to files that have been deleted for months.
Is it me, or should I go ahead with a revenge plot against Microsoft?*
*Rhetorical question. Revenge plot already in motion. Any Dopers in Edmonds WA may wish to stay inside all day Tuesday, particularly if they hear anything that sounds like several hundred thousand angry bees buzzing
I don’t know how much it sucks since I keep all my stuff where I know where to find it so I don’t use the search. I did turn that damn indexing off though as it was causing my computer to slow down. It was using 40-80% of my memory all the time.
Like you, I keep all my stuff in the appropriate folder so it’s easy to find; fex, the church history project I alluded to in “Skald’s Documents,” “Writing Projects,” “For Pay,” "[Church Name] History, and is includes folders named “Text,” “Research,” "and “Archives.” So it 's rarely an issue for me, but even so, occasionally I think, “Hey, I did some research for a gay s & m story three years ago I can use for this bit I’m working on,” but can’t remember what the title of the story I’m lookiing for is. It would be nice if Vista had a freaking usable Search engine.
Ah well. The bees will settle things things for me.
The indexing should have slowed down once all the files were indexed. It’s using less than 70 MB on my system right now, if I’m reading the info correctly.
It seems to work well enough. I preferred the Google Desktop search though, because the interface was simpler and more logical. But I also really like Microsoft OneNote, and its search depends on the Windows indexing service, so I don’t have much choice and I don’t want to use both.
I think it is horrible. I can never find what I want. And because it is difficult to use I am not familiar with it- even in “advanced” mode I cannot see how to search on a file extension properly.
The seach function is one of my biggest issues with vista. As Cicero said, it won’t search for extentions properly. In advance mode I ask it for documents only, it shows me search results that are pictures, MP3s and screensavers. Worse, it can’t find things with the word you’re looking for embedded in the item’s name like seach for “paint” and it won’t find “skybluepaint01.jpg” even though it’s right there! And since an automatic update a few months back search crashes more than half the time.
According to the white papers, they’re supposed to be improving the seach feature with service pack 1. Wasn’t that going to be released last month? sigh.
Mine was ok for awhile then one day it started acting up. I’ve seen lots of people having the same problem. I don’t really search so I don’t care if it’s indexed or not.
Sometimes I have to search through thousands of folders looking for a particular address or reference number from bygone days. When this happens, I use VMWare to run a copy of Windows XP within Vista, to have the benefit of a straightforward search function that does what you ask it to the first time instead of forcing you to do a half-assed (and time-consuming) cursory search before looking more closely.
I tried Google Desktop and I hated it. Ugly and annoying and incomprehensible. I must’ve missed something fundamental because it really semed to not do anything useful for me at all.