Vista has lots of new features and while the new user interface (UI) is very cute, cuddly and even makes life easier, one of the most useful features that I find is the new search facility. I recently heard the term “stop searching and start finding” and realised that this was probably a great description to goal of searching – it still takes effort, so time to spill the beans on how to find things easier in Vista. One quick thing to point out is that Vista will index not just the file names and dates, but also the contents of your files too. This process will busy itself on your machine when Vista is 1^st loaded, so give it some time, but once it is done, it is done. I let this onetime slowdown happen while I was asleep as I left running overnight to index my 40-50GB of documents and photos.

There are four places where the search tools show their hand in Vista before you start putting other applications on that use this technology, such as Office 2007:

• Start Menu (find programs and a quick file search tool)
• Search Window (full blown search UI)
• Explorer windows (when browsing your hard disk)
• Control Panel (finding things in Control Panel just got easy)

Customising your search engine

Before we get into the searching itself, we should probably talk about customising the search to meet your needs. To do this, fire up the control panel and click on “System Maintenance” and then the “Indexing Options” to get the control panel we want. Once here, pressing modify will allow you to change the places that are searched, although you will need to press the User Access Control (UAC) “Show all locations” button to add your drives. Ticking a drive will enable search across the whole drive. Likewise the advanced option will give you the capability to fix any indexing woes by rebuilding the index (save this tip as it was a must in early betas) or moving the index locations.

However, for more useful customisation, you need to go back to Control Panel, choose “Appearance and Personalisation” and then select “Folder Options” – on the 3^rd tab here are the useful search settings. From here you can choose how indexing works on non – indexed locations by enabling or disabling content searching for files not in the index. You can also disable sub-folder searching, not something I would do personally, but you can enable “natural language search”, which would mean removing the colons and other similar things from the search examples below. Finally you can choose whether Vista looks inside compressed files for the files in those, even when not indexed.

Searching in the start menu

Pressing the new start button in Vista now shows the new start menu, but also has the search window at the bottom with the text “Start Search”. Pressing just one letter, such as “R” for Russell shows you all the programs, files, websites in your browser history and e-mails that could be potential matches. This means that if you were searching for Reliability tools, you will found them with one button press - pretty amazing if like me you have lots of stuff in your start menu. While you can do all the powerful things that we will discuss next, I mainly use this small sized search for programs and very simple file searches.

Using the Search Window

This is uber search weapon in Vista’s arsenal – you can do anything from here. This can be launched from the start menu by clicking on “Search”, or by pressing Windows key + F for find.

The search is started in much the same way, except you now see an Explorer Window with the search box in the top right corner. Once again as you type the search starts and then narrows the results. If you have too many results being found, a standard notification bar appears that tells you to narrow your search as you have too many results (which seems to be more than 5,000 items). As a power user you easily narrow the search by typing things like “modified:last week” into the box along with the words you are looking for. Remembering all the search terms is not so easy, so why not press the “Advanced” button to do it through the search interface, which builds the search string for you, so picking date after 1/09/2006 on the UI adds “date:>01/09/2006” to the search string. You can also do things like limit the file types to remove e-mails or only search for music.

Explorer Windows

Explorer windows have all the search functionality of the Search window, but instead of looking for things across all of the places you have indexed, just searches where you are and the sub-folders. This means that you can navigate to where you think a document should be under, not be able to see it, then click in the search box in the top right corner and type in the item you were looking for, such as “blog” – if there is something about blogs in that folder or below, you will know instantly. One other nice feature of search is that even when you are somewhere it does not normally search, so for me my “d:\software” folder, I can still use the search for things like “*.doc” or just type a partial filename and while not quite so instant, it will go find files that match the filespec – a bit like doing a “dir /s **.doc” would do in a command prompt box.

Control Panel

The argument still rages – Classis or New view in control panel. If you want to see which programs have icons, people go for classic and if you are not so caring, but want to see what you can do, it is the new UI for you. There is now a 3^rd and much more powerful option for you to work with, the search box. If you know you want to change the background, but don’t know where to find it, just type “back” into the search box and anything that has the word back in its’ title or description will be found, including the item under “Personalisation” for “Change Desktop Background”. Again, as soon as you press the 1^st letter the search starts, so you simply type until you see what you want. Amazingly simple and stops you from ever losing a control panel item again.

The help file covers more on the advanced features of search, including the natural language function mentioned earlier which means you type things a little less “computer speak” and still get your results, so for example, if you change the search options to turn on natural language processing, then something like kind:music artist:(Pink OR “Scissor Sisters”) becomes music by Pink or “Scissor Sisters”

Learning on your own

You now have the basic tools for doing any search. Any column that you can show in the Explorer windows is open for this type of trick. To find out the columns names, right click on the columns already shown and pick the “More button” to see all the keywords you can use. Simple examples include “size:>1024KB” or for e-mail “from:(Russell Thomas)” and “has attachments:true”