Windows Vista: Focus on Search

One fine day I found myself staring at the Windows XP search animation, waiting patiently when the irony struck. The Windows XP search animation is a picture of a dog that is flipping through a book page by page searching for something. The irony here is how clear that animation depicts the actual search process in Windows XP. You give it a file name and it starts searching the hard drive file by file looking for matches.

Lucky for us Windows Vista's search is a significant improvement over XP; in fact it is very competitive with Mac OS X's spotlight service that has garnered so much attention. The search in Vista is a huge leap forward, in fact I would go so far as to say that is the single greatest reason to upgrade from XP. Vista is not only a spectacular search system, but it also excels in the usability category. This search is so good it will change the way you work with your computer. Read on to find out more tips, tricks and features of Vista's new search.

Search For The Masses

The true beauty of Vista’s search is usability, just press the Windows Key and start typing. By the time you have a few characters typed search results will already be displayed. No waiting or staring at the progress bar, just results. This is one area where Vista outstripes Spotlight, the single key press to start the search simply more convenient and easier to use than a key combination. In the off chance that you are a fan of using the mouse, you can still find convenient search bars in explorer, outlook, and various other places.

Vista not only indexes file names it also delves into the content as well. Using a similar technology to Microsoft’s iFilters, Vista can extract the meaningful content out of many types of documents. All of your PDF’s and Word documents are searchable based on the text within the document. Outlook users will especially appreciate the integration with Office 2007 (I don’t have 2003 installed so I can’t confirm any integration but I suspect it will work just the same). All of your email and OneNote documents are indexed and can be searched just as easily.

Changing The Way You Use Your Computer

Before I moved to Windows Vista I used a combination of Google Desktop and Colibri to work with my computer. I mainly used Google Desktop for desktop searching, finding files and email. I used Colibri as a fast intuitive way to launch applications. For you Mac OSX users out there be sure to checkout QuickSilver, it changed the way I use a computer and spawned my dependence on programs like Colibri. Vista’s search as effectively replaced all of these applications. When I want to launch an application I press the windows key, type a fragment of the application's name and press enter. For programs that I launch commonly this whole process takes less than a second. Now imagine opening up the start menu, clicking all programs (don’t forget to wait for the menu to load), navigate the menu and find the program and launch it. There is simply no comparison, the start menu search lets you launch applications with stunning speed.

Search Tips

A new way to use the start menu Rather than navigating the all programs list, simply start typing the name of the program you want to launch. The search bar will return a list of entries, if your entry is the top entry you don’t even have to click on it. Just hit enter.

Natural language Search Microsoft has a little feature called natural language searching that is turned off by default. This feature tells the search system to try to parse out some meaning from the query by looking for common phrases. For example search you can search for “email from George” or “photos from july”. For more information view this blog entry. This is a really neat feature when you want to limit your query to just one document type.

Future Work For The Search Team

Overall I think the search in Vista is a huge success, but I am a demanding computer user so I can always find room for improvement. My biggest wish is better error tolerance when searching. The launchers like Colibri and QuickSilver let you skip letters and spaces but still try to find the closets match to what you have typed. I realize that a desktop search is significantly different than a launcher but this would be a nice feature to see.