Why is search so brain dead these days?

I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Yousuf Khan

On 2020-06-20 5:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan

I really can't help you here because I never use Windows search.
I use "Search Everything" and "Agent Ransack" exclusively. sorry

Rene

On 6/20/2020 4:06 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-06-20 5:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan

I really can't help you here because I never use Windows search.
I use "Search Everything" and "Agent Ransack" exclusively. sorry

Rene


Me too. They are both great.

--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

Who would you trust to provide accurate information about
COVID-19? Doctors who have studied viruses and treated
patients for years? Or a TV actor who tweets "cofefe"?

On 6/20/2020 4:06 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-06-20 5:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan

I really can't help you here because I never use Windows search.
I use "Search Everything" and "Agent Ransack" exclusively. sorry



Ditto. They are much better than Windows search.


--
Ken

On 6/20/2020 4:11 PM, David E. Ross wrote:
On 6/20/2020 4:06 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-06-20 5:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan

I really can't help you here because I never use Windows search.
I use "Search Everything" and "Agent Ransack" exclusively. sorry

Rene


Me too. They are both great.

By the way, I use DuckDuckGo at https://duckduckgo.com/ for searching
the Internet. That search engine does NOT track my browsing and then
sell the information to advertisers.


--
David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/

Who would you trust to provide accurate information about
COVID-19? Doctors who have studied viruses and treated
patients for years? Or a TV actor who tweets "cofefe"?

Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Yousuf Khan

Windows search is prefaced on "search indexer" with "brute force scan"
as a secondary option. Vista was the best, in that the search had
a "try harder" tick box, which institionalized the notion of the
brute force filename search. Later versions are kinda lame by
comparison.

The only area with some chance of accidentally being searched,
is your home directory. That will probably work.

Other areas can have permission problems. Everything.exe (a third
party product), could actually search everywhere at first, but
when it ended up checking the file size of everything, if a
file size check failed, the file ended up not listed.

It's up to you, to do

control.exe
Indexing Options
(Modify areas of C: to be indexed)

and try and include more of the materials on the disk.

Windows search has a search language, and you can try
your hand at

filename:*something*

or whatever. Be creative and see if it understands regex,
pcre, or the notion of wildcards.

filename:*

filename:*.*

There might be a web page out there, documenting the
Windows 10 version of search language. Good luck finding it :-)

Since you sound like a motivated individual, who knows
what you'll discover :-)

Paul

On 2020-06-20 3:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan

I suggest you try out a modern Mac and its Spotlight facility.

:-)

Alan Baker wrote:
On 2020-06-20 3:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for
some reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a
search for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the
old days, these searches would find all instances where the string
would occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do
searches, and you could even do multiple words to narrow down the
searches. What has gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Yousuf Khan

I suggest you try out a modern Mac and its Spotlight facility.

:-)

Or, for $3000 less, you could learn how to use the Windows Search
instead. For one thing, if you use the "filename: " directive,
you can avoid a lot of "content splatter". Another one I use
would be "ext:dll" to list all the DLLs on the machine.
If you want content, you could try "content:fritters".

The Windows search can also be called from a script. That
might help, if you want to keep a file with all the filenames
resulting from the search.

And if you dump a couple of the tables in the Windows.edb,
it's possible to work out exactly what items have been indexed
and are inside the index. In case you want to spot stuff
not getting indexed. Since Everything.exe cannot "see" into
lxss (WSL directory), you could check to see whether the
Windows Search indexed in there.

It's a hobby.

Else Agent Ransack/Everything.exe .

Paul

Alan Baker , an obvious Linux/Mac
proselytizer posting in the wrong newsgroup, wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

I'm referring mainly to Windows search, ...

I suggest you try out a modern Mac and its Spotlight facility.

That is not a solution. Does nothing to address the problem. Go
inhabit your Mac newsgroups and stop bothering those using a different
OS than your choice.

Gee, my ashtrays are filled up. Recommendation: get a new car. Uh huh.

Yousuf Khan wrote:

I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too.
In the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive.
For example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and
expect you might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever.
But for some reason, the current Windows search cannot find these.

Perhaps you did not configure Windows Search to include the C:\Program
Files and C:\Program Files (x86) folders (and their subfolders), or add
whatever folders contain the "virtual"-named files you expect to find.

Run Control Panel (control.exe), search on "index" in the Search box
(upper right), select Indexing Options, and click Modify. Just because
the C: drive is selected doesn't mean everything is selected under it.
Click on C: to expand that tree node. Check the folders you want
indexed, like where are the executables for virtualwhatever are
selected.

I modified that list a long time ago, so I cannot tell you which folders
would be the default selections upon a fresh/new install of Windows.
You might also try rebuilding the indexing database. That takes a long
time depending on how many folders it has to search under, the number of
subfolders, how many files are in the [sub]folders, and if you search
only by filename or by both filename and content.

Searching in the content of files can take a very long time to complete
building an indexing database for Windows Search. Including the
contents of the files in the targeted locations can take days to finish.
Back in the Indexing Options dialog, click Advanced, select the File
Types tab, and check which option is enabled: "Index Properties only" or
"Index Properties and File Contents".

Presumably you did not disable the Windows Search service. Have you
checked it is enabled? In services.msc, that service should be
configured for Automatic startup and currently be in Running state.

If you do a search for the full name, then it may find them (hit and
miss). In the old days, these searches would find all instances where
the string would occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy
to do searches, and you could even do multiple words to narrow down
the searches. What has gone wrong with search algorithms now?

The search provided by Microsoft has always hidden some files no matter
how you configure it. You can open a command shell, navigate to a
folder, do a 'dir' command and see a file, but it is missed by Windows
Search (and even Windows/File Explorer does show all files). That's why
many users switch to a different search tool; e.g., voidtools [Search]
Everything, FileLocator Lite (aka Agent Ransack).

Windows Search has it own rather proprietary syntax on how to specify
search criteria.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/win...s-aqsreference
https://www.howtogeek.com/school/lea...indows-search/

If you know regex, you'll want to use something else, like voidtool's
[Search] Everything which let you do the old MS-DOS syntax with
wildcarding or toggle into regex mode to be far more specific on what
you want to find. However, both modes will do substring searches, so
you can use "virtual" instead of "^virtual" for regex for files
beginning with that substring.

Normally Everything only searches on filesname, but you can use the
option to search within the files on your criteria. That is a very slow
process that has to open every file in the target locations to read
through to parse out the keywords in each found file.

On 2020-06-20 5:58 p.m., Paul wrote:
Alan Baker wrote:
On 2020-06-20 3:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too.
In the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive.
For example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and
expect you might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever.
But for some reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If
you do a search for the full name, then it may find them (hit and
miss). In the old days, these searches would find all instances where
the string would occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy
to do searches, and you could even do multiple words to narrow down
the searches. What has gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Â*Â*Â*Â* Yousuf Khan

I suggest you try out a modern Mac and its Spotlight facility.

:-)

Or, for $3000 less, you could learn how to use the Windows Search
instead. For one thing, if you use the "filename: " directive,
you can avoid a lot of "content splatter". Another one I use
would be "ext:dll" to list all the DLLs on the machine.
If you want content, you could try "content:fritters".


So you can buy a Windows machine for -$2,201?

Wow!

The Windows search can also be called from a script. That
might help, if you want to keep a file with all the filenames
resulting from the search.

And you think Spotlight can't?

https://www.google.com/search?q=using+spotlight+in+terminal&oq=using+spot light+in+terminal&aqs=chrome..69i57.5810j0j4&sourc eid=chrome&ie=UTF-8



And if you dump a couple of the tables in the Windows.edb,
it's possible to work out exactly what items have been indexed
and are inside the index. In case you want to spot stuff
not getting indexed. Since Everything.exe cannot "see" into
lxss (WSL directory), you could check to see whether the
Windows Search indexed in there.

Here's what gets indexed by Spotlight:

Everything.

On 2020-06-20 6:13 p.m., VanguardLH wrote:
Alan Baker , an obvious Linux/Mac
proselytizer posting in the wrong newsgroup, wrote:

Yousuf Khan wrote:

I'm referring mainly to Windows search, ...

I suggest you try out a modern Mac and its Spotlight facility.

That is not a solution. Does nothing to address the problem. Go
inhabit your Mac newsgroups and stop bothering those using a different
OS than your choice.

When you do something about your trolls infecting Mac newsgroups, I'll
stop posting here.

Until then, I'll educate you about how much better it could be for you.


Gee, my ashtrays are filled up. Recommendation: get a new car. Uh huh.

And there are times when that IS a valid recommendation.

Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

Yousuf Khan

OK, on Windows 10, try this.

In the Settings wheel, is a button for Enhanced Search.
That will turn on C: .

Below it, is some exclusion folders that were automatically
placed there by Windows. You can remove most all of those,
except one. And that's the folder that contains Windows.edb
(because if you index that, the Indexer will never go to sleep).

https://www.howtogeek.com/424526/how...0s-start-menu/

Here is a picture of the Win10-2004 x64 one I just set up for test.

https://i.postimg.cc/CK0fWTbL/enhanced-search.gif

HTH,
Paul

"David E. Ross" on Sat, 20 Jun 2020 16:11:05
-0700 typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
On 6/20/2020 4:06 PM, Rene Lamontagne wrote:
On 2020-06-20 5:54 p.m., Yousuf Khan wrote:
I'm referring mainly to Windows search, but this applies to a lot of
other search algorithms all over the place and on the Internet too. In
the olden days, search was very efficient and somewhat intuitive. For
example, let's say you try to do a search for "virtual" and expect you
might find something like VirtualBox, VirtualPC, whatever. But for some
reason, the current Windows search cannot find these. If you do a search
for the full name, then it may find them (hit and miss). In the old
days, these searches would find all instances where the string would
occur, even as part of a substring. It was very easy to do searches, and
you could even do multiple words to narrow down the searches. What has
gone wrong with search algorithms now?

****Yousuf Khan

I really can't help you here because I never use Windows search.
I use "Search Everything" and "Agent Ransack" exclusively. sorry

Rene


Me too. They are both great.

Does it work on Amazon?
--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Alan Baker" wrote

| Here's what gets indexed by Spotlight:
|
| Everything.

But can Spotlight find it all on Windows? I use
Agent Ransack. It finds text in files, file name
segments, etc, at an amazing speed, and I don't
need indexing. Anything can quickly look up stored
data in a database, but the trouble is that such a
program has to run regularly to update its record.
That's not necessary with Agent Ransack. And best
of all, AR can find the files on Windows. I don't
have any files on a Mac.