Win 7 search blows!!! any suggestions

That's what I read, anyway.

 

good point, noted.

 

You reveal some serious bias here. I assume you are talking about "amateurs", I assume, too...

That's fine, because none of the above is true, as you have been told. As a matter of fact, it turns out that Windows Search is the real power tool, that comes with a complex and full-featured search query language. What people here are complaining about is that it does not come with the kind of cute eye-candy little search boxes that your are used to from AR. Yes, Win7's default search is simple, but if you are a power user, you can do everything with it that AR can do, and more.

Windows Search does give you all of this control, but, alas, since Win7 it doesn't offer you those cute little boxes anymore. Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with this criticism, those GUI devices for some frequently used search scenarios are genuinely useful.

That's not a big difference. Which tool did you use first? If you did not reboot in between tries, the results may have been affected by caching.

What's that price you are not willing to pay? You do understand that this price is as close to zero as it gets, do you?

Nothing in Windows Search prevents you from being as smart as you want, see above.

Those search tools are a dime a dozen. There must be hundreds of freeware search utilities out there, with AR being just one of many. Again, not to be misunderstood, there is nothing wrong with AR, or with people preferring it over Windows Search. My only point really is, there is nothing wrong with Windows Search either, except for the fact that after Vista, Microsoft crippled the Windows Explorer interface to it badly. Like I said, this may not have been entirely Microsoft's fault.

 

actually more like frustration. being brushed off by ignorance tends to annoy most people, at least try the software before commenting.

Well its obvious from the OP's post that they weren't happy with the windows 7 default search. That same reason was why i searched for an alternative. if you are happy with it, fine... but the OP is not. The default windows search is NOT as powerful, quite simply because it's nowhere near as configurable.

see, i actually prefer the look of windows search, i think it's actually prettier than agent ransack which looks like a rather dated gui... Those "pretty little boxes" are actually useful input parameters. a feature NOT included with win7 search. plus win7 search is fully integrated with windows gui... much more aesthetically pleasing.

right, not a big difference. just a few minutes.... consider the fact that in the time that it took win7 search to find the text in only a "preselected file type" yes it's there and you CANNOT configure it (at least i do not know how!).... agent ransack looked through EVERY file... including zips and isos (default settings in win7 search disable this feature).... so agent ransack beat the win7 search time by a lot more than you realise.... it was crippled and still beat the win7 time.

oh and btw, i used agent ransack first since i thought it may be quicker. it has a seperate cache (which i cleared prior to the test just in case).

not money, i'm talking about performance and disk usage. indexing takes time, space and can cause fragmentation... its already recommended in most cases to disable if using an SSD drive for example. AR is without indexing and performs faster than win7 search plain and simple... try it and you will see.

right except you need to be an expert in boolean expressions in order to achieve the same result as entering a bit of info into seperate boxes in agent ransack.

yes i agree, about the number of search tools i mean. there are many, and i've tried many. i've found AR to be the best i've found and was giving my opinion in a thread called "Win 7 search blows!!!" the op was asking for a suggestion, and i was trying to be helpful. in response i get swarmed upon by people posting totally unhelpful posts (from the OP's pov) as to how biased my results are... not a single one of you who attacked me offered an ALTERNATIVE... which is what the original topic is about... not defending microsoft products... thankyou.

i'm not against ms products either, however in this case i found win7 search rather lacking and difficult to use more than basic file searches, i found myself googling "how to use windows 7 search" just to do slightly more advanced things. i found the perfect solution to my problem by installing AR and will not use win7 search again if i can help it, i was just sharing that info with the OP.

Honestly its a small download... you want proof, try it yourself, conduct your own experiments and see your own results. i'm expressing my opinion as to the best alternative option to windows 7 search. if you're happy with windows 7 search i couldn't care less... but then again neither could the OP if i'm not mistaken. My sincere appologies to the OP who must read what this thread has degenerated into.

 

You haven't bothered to try Windows 7 search with Indexing enabled, as it was designed to be used. I'm not being ignorant. I'm being annoyed by bad method.

Yes and no. It's capable, but, as previously noted, doesn't give you a 100+ field GUI for all the available flags. For the average user, all but one is a waste. It's the same reason probably 99% of Google users don't even know the advanced search page exists - a single field suffices for them because their queries are based on words, not file dates, sizes, etc.

My biggest problem is that you're not indexing and doing totally different searches between the two. Noone said Agent Ransack is slow or incompetent. But you're not doing an apples to apples comparison even though you make it try to sound like it. You're comparing apples to rotten orange that have been beaten to a pulp. At least have AR search the same exact file types as Win7 so there's an even comparison. The result will be even more impressive.

Indexing is a one-time affair for the most part. I don't know where the fragmentation claim comes from, but defrag should be scheduled on a windows 7 machine anyway. As far as SSDs go, this advice is a holdover from the incredibly crappy original JMicron controller. It would stutter under any kind of rapid access. Write cycles aren't really a concern since you're more likely to ditch the drive by the time the blocks are that bad anyway. I'd be far more concerned with temp files, cookies, browser cache, flash downloads, windows updates, and log files hammering the drive than an index that should be limited to specific folders and file types (which it IS by DEFAULT). The index only gets updated when a new file gets added, so you're already writing to the drive. SSDs don't care about fragmentation. What's the problem?

Novice boolean suffices to do some strong searches, but okay. Forcing boolean use is more annoying than it would need to be if they just left a few fields, I'd agree there.

Noone actually said AR was bad. Your testing method was bad and made the comparison utterly useless. That's the problem. It's not a question of defending Microsoft products in particular, it's a question of preventing bad science.

Legitimate problem with win7 search. AR exists because Windows search is lacking in some aspects and fills the void for some users.

I'm content with my configuration of Win7 search and indexing, so I have no motivation.

 

you mean... the default install settings are not the way it was designed to be used?
i have to tweak it so much in order to be a fair comparison.... however with agent ransack i just install and run....
who's being biased here? honestly?

in my case i was using removable hdd....

you actually index removable hdd's? i have 4 x 1TB hdd which i swap out using a dock... indexing is fine, however in my case it wasn't an option.

the only problem is that win7 search will not allow me to do a fair comparison because it is so limiting. you're right, i agree it was a stupid idea to do this comparison in the first place in anything more than a simple file search. For file contents, win7 search does not give enough options to even make a fair comparison possible.

it's a well known and documented fact that indexing causes a performance hit. i've felt it myself with my current system, it's about as equivalant as a virus scanner however much less important (imo).

you're right, i appologise. in the end i should have just said "try AR, i found it better than win7 search"

agreed. it's great to have alternative options.

right, but the op isn't.

 

I have tried AR, along with about a dozen alternatives. I may know a lot more about the various desktop search programs available than you; I certainly know a lot more about it than you seem to think I do.

And you have been told about a half dozen times now that you are completely wrong about this. Windows Search is more powerful than AR, although that power is not as easily accessible. I guess it's more of a tool for power users, whereas AR caters more to the point-and-click type.

Sigh... Those features ARE included with Windows Search, but they are NOT fully integrated with the GUI. You have things exactly backwards.

Of course we are not talking about money. The performance hit of indexing is practically zero once the intial index is established, and the recommendation to turn off indexing when using SSDs is plain nonsense.

Actually, Windows Search also allows you to use natural language search, for the more simple-minded user.

How about using Windows Help and Support? The info is right there.

I have tried it, along with a dozen others. I found them all lacking, in particular when it comes to searching Outlook databases and archives. But that's a different topic.

No, you don't. Indexing is enabled by default.

Once again, that is nonsense, see above. It gives you all the options you could ever wish for. Just not as easily as AR.

"Well known and documented", eh? It's a well-known fairytale, perpetuated by people who have no understanding whatsoever of what they are talking about. Indexing in Win7 has no noticeable performance impact even during the initial build of the index, simply because it is slowed down to a crawl in order not to affect overall system performance. Once the index has been built, the impact is exactly zero, unless you add a file (or several, or lots of them), in which case the impact is almost zero. This nonsense of turning off indexing to increase performance has no relationship to reality, period, end of sentence.

P.S.: As an aside, of course, the right way to build an alternative to Windows Search would be to hook into Windows' built-in search infrastructure, and in particular use its index, but offer an improved interface on top of that. Not very hard to do, really, and I know that some of the more powerful Windows Explorer alternatives (such as Directory Opus) may have this capability soon. Speaking of which, you might want to give DOpus a try if you want a real powerful Explorer alternative, including built-in search capabilities. It's not free, however.

 

oh on a side note...windows defrag does not work...no it doesnt. Get periforms defraggler. Windows defragger said all drivers were fragmantaion free. periforms defraggler found one drive with 60%!!!!!!! fragmented and the rest were from 10-25% fragmented!!! test it. You'll see that windows defragmenter doesn't work.


EDIT:I'll make a new thread in a week or 2 after my drives get messed up. But give it a try you'll be blown away!

 

It depends on how to measure fragmentation. MS measures only files with fragments under 64MB. The logic behind it is that for large files with large fragments, fragmentation isn't the problem. The bottleneck is the interface, the size of the pipe, and the limited rotation speed of the drive. Defraggler and most 3rd party options measure fragmentation the same way XP defrag did, counting every file split to more than one piece as fragmented.

You can choose to go back to the older-style measurement of defrag, but it has to be done by CLI. Personally, I just stick with the GUI because I really don't care if my 1 GB isos are split into 2 pieces that are 100MB, 200MB, and 700MB. If I do choose to run by CLI, the result is roughly equivalent to the third party options and XP-defrag.

 

it was all sorts of fragments. larger an smaller than 64mbs i had files with 100s of fragmentations. It was absurd. But i don't want to stray off this topic. I'll make a new post in a while when the fragmentations come back. You really should check...its was bad....i litterlly had 60% fragmentation of a drive