Comments on: Digging Deeper: Searching in Windows

By: Simon

Simon — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 06:38:44 +0000

Im a big fan of Google Desktop, but not sure if it offers any plus points over MS Search anymore. Im not fussed about searching my gmail, but its really handy to search my outlook, as it keeps a cache of my messages after ive deleted them in outlook. Does MS Search do this?

By: Tom Wijsman

Tom Wijsman — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:01:57 +0000

@cwallenpoole: Doing a grep on everything is indeed very slow, index based searching is way more efficient and doesn't decrease the life span of the HDD that much. Why would you make it harder?

By: Tom Wijsman

Tom Wijsman — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:58:19 +0000

@LanceRoberts: Search Everything does have good Path Search functionality, see how the syntax works on their website. Thanks for mentioning Agent Ransack as a file contents able alternative, at the cost of a bigger index...

By: Amro

Amro — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:07:56 +0000

For those who want to search within file contents, I suggest the excellent Agent Ransack from Mythicsoft

By: Kissaki

Kissaki — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 13:40:20 +0000

I used locate32 before. Very fast and the index-file is a lot smaller than windows ones. At the moment though I don’t use anything. I’m fairly organized. :)

By: cwallenpoole

cwallenpoole — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:53:15 +0000

And for those who don't know: Cygwin is a nix command line emulator for Windows. find ./ -exec grep .user.* {} \; -print

By: cwallenpoole

cwallenpoole — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 23:52:03 +0000

Personally, I use Cygwin. It isn't as fast, but it does what I need and it is far better than any of the MS provided tools.

By: Lance Roberts

Lance Roberts — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:29:34 +0000

Clarification: On the Windows Search it is Indexing that I've disabled, that keeps me from being able to use it.

By: Lance Roberts

Lance Roberts — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:28:08 +0000

I don’t use Windows Search since I have a SSD and don’t want to work it.

Windows Everything I found doesn’t have good path search functionality, at all, but I use it sometimes.

Agent Ransack works the best, but has a Windows 7 bug that’s irritating.

See this post on SU for more: http://superuser.com/questions/209231/better-windows-7-search