How to… Find files faster with Windows Enhanced Search
What you need: Windows 10 Time required: 30 minutes plus indexing time
Back in the 1980s, technology experts promised that we’d soon be working in paperless offices. That never came to fruition, and they focused their attention instead on the digital revolution: your files will be available anywhere, any time, on any device. This time they might have got it right, but only thanks to a lot of hard work behind the scenes by Microsoft and other companies that have a hand in indexing those files.
When computers and operating systems were first developed, the idea of replicating the analogue world, in which documents (files) were stored in folders (directories) inside individual filing cabinets (hard drives) made a lot of sense. Why? Because computers weren’t yet powerful enough to manage the filing themselves. They needed us to keep track of where we’d saved our files and to use logical file names so that when we needed to find them again, we could do so – manually.
Fast forward to 2020 and that’s no longer necessary. While we wouldn’t recommend it, you could keep all of your files in a single folder and use whichever filename was suggested by the program that created them – or even use a series of numbers of random characters that would mean nothing the next time you browsed them.
That’s because computers are finally powerful enough – and operating systems smart enough – to index not only the names of each file, but their contents, too, so you can search directly for the assets you need based on what you remember of their subject matter, not just their titles.
Here, we’ll show you how Windows’ recently updated Enhanced Search tools will help you find files faster and organise your hard drive in whichever way works best for you.
1 Add folders to Windows Classic Search
By default, in order to keep things running as smoothly as possible, Windows is set up for what’s known as Classic Search, which indexes only your desktop and Libraries (Documents, Pictures, Videos and so on). You can add other folders – or remove the defaults – by opening Settings (press Windows+i) and clicking Search, followed by Searching Windows in the sidebar. Click the ‘Customize search locations here’ link (below the Classic heading – see screenshot 1 ), followed by Modify 2 , then click the right-pointing chevron (>) beside the drive containing the folder you want to add/remove and navigate through the directory structure. Tick the box beside any folder you want to include in your search results, and untick any you want to remove.
As soon as you’ve added a folder, Windows will start to compile a catalogue of its contents. How long this takes depends on the number of files and subfolders it contains, but if you don’t start to notice the difference in your searches within the next few hours, you can manually force a complete rebuild of the index. To do so, go back to the box where you clicked Modify, and this time click Advanced, followed by the Rebuild button beside ‘Delete and rebuild index’.
You’ll notice some other options on this screen, the most important of which is ‘Treat similar words with diacritics as different words’. Diacritics are accents and other modifiers that can sometimes change a word’s meaning. They’re mercifully rare in English, but if you regularly work across multiple languages and use accents appropriately, this option may be worth checking.
2 Switch to Windows Enhanced Search
To get the most out of Windows’ search tools, enable Enhanced Search by opening Settings and clicking Search. Next, click ‘Searching Windows’ on the left, then select Enhanced (see screenshot below). As Windows warns, this can shorten your battery life and slow your PC due to the increased workload that needs to take place behind the scenes – and not just when you first turn it on. Every time you create or edit a file the index is updated to take account of your amendments. Moreover, Windows will index your entire hard drive, not just the libraries and desktop.
Because of this, you should make sure you’re connected to mains power before enabling Enhanced Search. If you don’t, it will take longer for you to experience its benefits because Windows will postpone the re-indexing operation if you’re using a laptop running on battery.
There are several folders that Windows won’t index, even if you’re using Enhanced Search, because their contents are rarely relevant to home users. These include hidden folders, administration folders and so on. However, if you want to actively exclude a folder, perhaps because it’s a duplicate of a directory elsewhere or you just don’t want its contents to show up (maybe you want to exclude a personal folder on a machine that’s otherwise used for work), you can it add to the list.
Back in the Searching Windows box, Click ‘Add an excluded folder’ (see screenshot above), then navigate to the directory in the Explorer window that appears and click Select Folder. If you later want to add that folder back into the catalogue, click it in the list of excluded folders, then click the ‘Remove excluded folder’ button that appears.
3 Choose whether to index names or contents
As we mentioned at the outset, one of the major improvements made to Windows’ search tools over the years is an ability to index a file based not only on its filename and extension, but also on its contents. Naturally a catalogue that references files’ contents will require more resources (including more disk space), so it’s worth checking specifically which file types Windows is indexing, and how.
Staying on the Searching Windows
page, scroll down to More Search Indexer Settings and click Advanced Search Indexer Settings to pull up the same box you used above to add folders to the Classic Search catalogue. This time, rather than changing the folder selection, click Advanced and switch to the File Types tab ( 1 in our screenshot above).
Move down through the list of file extensions until you find the one you want to adjust, and click it to see which aspects Windows includes in its catalogue. These are detailed immediately below the extensions list, where you’ll see whether just the file’s properties 2 (ie metadata 2 like its name and date of creation) are indexed, or both its properties and contents 3 . If your content-based searches for a specific file type aren’t turning up the results you’d expect, make sure the second of these options is selected.
In the unlikely event that a file type
you expect to see doesn’t appear in the list, you can add it manually by typing it into the box below ‘Add new extension to list’ 4 and clicking Add. You might want to do this if you frequently use portable programs - those that can be launched from a USB stick or without having to be installed on your hard drive – in which case Windows may be unaware of the kind of file they generate, so the extension could be missing from its list. Adding it lets you then choose whether Windows indexes only the unknown file type’s metadata, or also its contents.
Notice that every extension in the list, whether it’s one you’ve added or something that existed already, has a tickbox to its left. Unticking a box tells Windows not to index files of that type, in which case they won’t show up in search results. By selectively ticking these boxes and excluding folders you don’t want to search, you can tailor Enhanced Search to deliver only the most relevant files and folders. The list of results will be shorter, and you’ll spot what you were looking for more easily.
4 Search for specific file types
Now that you’ve set up Windows Search to behave the way you want, you can start using it to navigate your computer more quickly. You don’t need to use the taskbar search box because you can get the same results by pressing the Windows key and typing. So, if you want to save some taskbar space, right-click it, hover over Search then click Hidden.
Now, when you search, Windows will automatically push what it considers to be the most likely match to the top of the list, which will be a program if you’ve installed software whose name matches your search term. However, scrolling down the list will reveal files whose contents are also a close match. By clicking the tabs at the top of the results, you can isolate specific file types. Let’s say you want to find a Word document about Windows Search. Typing Windows Search after pressing the Windows key provides results geared towards amending your search settings.
However, if you then click Documents at the top of the box, the results will be narrowed to only show those which can be opened in another program. Clicking one opens it directly, but clicking the arrow that appears to its right, or using the arrow keys to move the highlight bar down through the list gives you more information, including its location and when it was last modified.
You can take a shortcut by adding the name of the tab to the start of your search. So, typing document: windows search (see screenshot above) will skip straight to the streamlined list of files, while web: windows search will pull up results from Bing.