Bericht #5051

[Ronald]

Hallo allemaal,

De onderstaande column verwoordt heel goed wat ik zelf ook van de Windows zoekfunctie vindt. In Windows XP werkte die nog heel aardig, maar sinds Windows Vista is het een crime geworden om bijv. een bestand met een bepaalde naam te vinden. In Windows 7 is het niet veel beter.

Wat vind jij van de zoekfunctie van Windows Vista/7?

Groeten,

Ronald

Bron: simple-talk.com

Editorial: Music before bells and whistles

Why is it that Windows runs out of puff when attempting to  find content on its file system? This is not an insurmountable technical problem; on my laptop, there is  a database within which can instantly be found text or names within vast numbers of records within 300 milliseconds. There's also a copy of Google Desktop that can find phrases within emails or documents, almost as rapidly.

It is an important, perhaps mundane, part of an operating system to be able to find files. The first thing to notice within Windows is that the facility to find files or text within files is called ‘search’ rather than ‘find’. Hmm. This may not bode well. What’s this? It does a brute-force search for file names? Here we are in an age when we can breed mice that glow with flourescence, and manufacture computers that fit in our shirt pockets, and we find an operating system that is still completely innocent of managing and indexing content in hierarchical data. One can actually read the files of my PC into a database, mimic the directory hierarchies and then find files in a flash; but when one does the same with Windows Vista, we are suddenly back in a 1960s time warp.

Finding files based on their name is bad enough, but finding files based on the content that they contain is more or less asking for an opportunity to wait 20 minutes in order to see a "file not found" message.

Sadly, with Windows 7, Microsoft seems to have wandered into the  folly of introducing bells and whistles before finishing the song. It's certainly true that Microsoft has added new features and a certain polish to Windows Search 4.0, the latest incarnation. It behaves more like a web search and offers a new search syntax, called Advanced Query Syntax, which allows you to search on file author, file magnitude, date ranges (e.g. date:>=7/4/09<=8/4/09), and so on. Nonetheless, it has not cured the more fundamental problem that, for most of us, the search still does not work reliably.

I've experienced first-hand its stubborn refusal, despite a full index scan having been performed, to acknowledge the existence of a file that exists, based on a search for an actual term within that file that also exists; a file that Google Desktop search, or old wingrep, finds in seconds. When many of us hark back to the halcyon days of Windows XP search, you know something is remarkably amiss.

Should applications get the basic stuff right before applying animated menus and Teletubby graphics, or is advancing age making me grumpy? I’d be pleased to hear from you as always. First prize for last newsletter comments goes to Alex Fekken.

Cheers,

Tony