Help and Search: XP was better than Win7

[Kulindahr]

So I'm trying to find a document I remember only by a couple of words in it. I go to the Win7 search spot, and it says it searches inside documents, not just the titles, so I'm like, kool, here we go; I type in my word, and tell it to do its thing...

zilch. It says there aren't any documents with that word, when I know there are at least a dozen.


So for fun I give it a word I know occurs a couple of hundred times, in fact in almost every document in a certain folder, so there should be at least a hundred documents listed as results.

It shows nine.


Annoyed, I give it another word, that should be nearly as ubiquitous as the last.

It shows eleven.



So I go to Help, and ask about searching for documents by words inside them.

I get nothing. I get lots about using folders, and searching for documents by words in the title, and searching with Internet Explorer, but not a bloody thing about searching contents.


I see that many results are talking about Internet Explorer, so I add a "-Internet" to the search string.

Now the results list has even more results about IE!




Now, before I go off on what imbeciles the drunk and stoned clueless geeks at Microslop who sat with their heads up each other's asses while composing useless questions no one will care about to stick together and call "Help" so they could get paid enough to raise the cost of the new Win7 software by $10 a pop were....

Can I have back the nice, thorough, adaptable, and actually useful search gadget from Win XP, that would have had me my results in less time than it would have taken to rub my nose, scratch Bammer's head, sip some power lemonade and pop a Dorito in my mouth?

 

[Corny]

what you want:
control panel -> index options

can't tell you much about the help, never used it in either version

 

[3nipples]

Search is much improved in Vista over XP, so I can't imagine it being worse in Win 7... You must have it set wrong or something else is wrong... Whatever it is, you should be able to find a solution.

 

[Kulindahr]

Okay, Corny, I see how that works. But it's a clumsier way to do what I could do in XP, choosing whether to search just titles or also contents for every search, instead of the global thing. When searching for details in my JUB Stories files, I often know the file names involved, so usually I don't need to go the slow route. Having to go back in and switch back and forth seems inefficient.

It doesn't change anything, though. What the results correlate with is a failure to search sub-folders.

 

[Kulindahr]

Search is much improved in Vista over XP, so I can't imagine it being worse in Win 7... You must have it set wrong or something else is wrong... Whatever it is, you should be able to find a solution.

I didn't set up anything -- it is as it came.

 

[gsdx]

I'm with you on the crappy search function. Even Windows 98 had a more efficient search. Now I find it almost as fast to go into My Computer and find the files by myself.

 

[looseliam]

That's why I have a third party app index my files for searching. It makes it much easier for me.

I use dtsearch (http://www.dtsearch.com/)

It's great for all my files and I use it to index favourite web sites so I can search them, too.

 

[Corny]

not sure what you are doing, but it searches in subfolders for me as well.

 

[Kulindahr]

not sure what you are doing, but it searches in subfolders for me as well.

I'm using the default settings. It says it searches in all the subfolders. But the only results it's giving me are those not in subfolders.