Windows Search 4.0 released. Shame it STILL doesn’t work
Microsoft released V4 of its Windows Search tool on Windows Update a few days ago. As I’ve criticised this tool in the past (it is one of my five pet Vista hates), I thought I’d give it a thorough test drive in case it was now a useful and usable product. Sadly my time was wasted: it’s still as crap as ever.
First of all, the truly inane “Did you find what you wanted” message is still displayed when nothing matched the search:
Of course that is just a minor irritation compared with another - show-stopping - feature. I’d reported before that the search tool seemed to struggle to find things at times. This new version still had that problem, so I decided to investigate. I created a new file - called xxx.wibble - in my documents folder, added some content and tried to search on that content. No matter what settings I selected, Windows Search would not find it. It turns out this is for a very simple reason. “wibble” is not a registered file extension on my machine and Windows Search only searches files with known file types. As soon as I renamed the file xxx.txt, the search found the content straight away. As far as I can find out, this is a hard-coded “feature” of Windows Search; there is no way to override it.
As a developer, I have a mass of files on my machine that have unusual, and non-registered, extensions. Some (think README files) have no extension. The fact that I cannot search these files with Windows Search means that Windows Search is not fit for purpose. So sadly V4 gets binned just like V3 did. Oh well, here’s waiting for version 5 (which might actiually be usable.)
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Exactly my experience.
Google Desktop Search does find what you want, but it messes with your system.
So when Search 5.0 comes out I’ll give it another try *sigh*
I thought - Oh new “working” search tool - nice!
No - PANTS and intrusive. So I went to Add/Remove programs and - low and behold - the entry disappeared but the search tool did not.
I HATE MICROSOFT.
Thank-you for allowing me a forum on which I could suitably vent my severe frustration…
Just add the file type “.” to the indexed file types and it will index all files.
You MS haters need to lighten up and do a little research.
Hi “Sigh”,
Thanks for the tip as it partially solves the problem of WDS not searching properly. By adding “.” to the set of indexed file types, I can now for example find files called “readme” on my system.
Sadly though your tip doesn’t solve the real problem. WDS still doesn’t bother to search the contents of all files, even after adding “.” to the set of indexed files. So regrettably I still have to stick with my assessment that WDS is not fit for purpose and will hope WDS V5 is released soon and that it actually works.