Adam
Fri May 09 15:01:55 PDT 2008
On Fri, 9 May 2008 12:20:34 -0500, "Celegans" <Celegans@nospam.nospam>
wrote:
>"Daniel" <noone@nowhere.com> wrote in message
>news:eVrBgWfsIHA.1768@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
>> is there a site where there is an explanation for how to use the Search
>> function in Vista Ultimate SP1.
>
>Advanced search techniques
>
http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/pages/advanced-search-techniques.aspx
>
>Coding Horror: Exploring Vista's Advanced Search
>
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000731.html
>
>In my hands, on my Vista Ultimate machine that is over a year old, Vista
>Search for strings in files often fails -- in fact Vista's search fails for
>me more often than it works. I can get search to work in Windows 95, 98,
>2000, and XP, but without a 3rd party tool I am not smart enough to find
>files with specified strings in Vista. I have found that Agent Ransack,
>
http://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/, works well to find files in Vista
>that I cannot find with Vista's search.
Just one of many examples where Vista is broken. I just tried an
experiment. I opened a Word document at random and came up with a
how-to for using E-Trade's trading platform. Notes I written to
myself. The phrase "market order" appears multiple times across
several documents somewhere within the text, but never in any file
name directly.
I used "advanced search" to search for the phrase. I made sure to
check look in non indexed and also Everywhere. Vista returned 167 hits
after narrowing the search to documents however NONE of the returned
"hits" contained the phrase and many hits contained neither word. So
Vista produced both false negative and false positives but seemed
unable to find any documents where the phase actually appears.
I next enclosed the phrase within quotes and searched again. Vista
said in found nothing. Yet I'm looking at the phrase in several
documents.
I repeated the experiment this time searching for my last name which I
know appears in thousands of documents. Vista only found 8 files where
my last name appears as author of some Excel spreadsheet ignoring all
the other files where I know for a fact it appears within the document
or as it's author.
No, "advanced" search isn't very advanced.
Limiting the search to what appears in the actual file name produces
better results. I have close to a million photos. If I search for
Bill, I do get hits for Bill, Bill-1, Bill-2, Bill-a, Bill-b, Billy,
Cousin Bill, Uncle Bill and similar variations.