The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
I know I’m way behind “the curve” blogging about a new feature in Windows Vista, and that it’s seriously old news these days, but I wanted to do a quick post on the search functionality that was introduced with Vista. As such, this isn’t going to be a post trying to sell the feature to you (as it might be if the feature were still new), but more an indication of how I use it on a day-to-day basis, and why. This post will be less technical than some of my usual posts to make it accessible to a wider audience. First off, ever since I was at college back in the very early noughties, using Windows 98 and 2000, I’ve been a big fan of the “Run” dialog. In later versions of Windows, you can press [Flag]+R to bring this up; alternatively, it’s right there in the Start Menu. For years, I’ve been hitting [Flag]+R and typing “winword” to fire up Word rather than trying to find it in the Start menu. This is part of my developer mindset: at my computer, my keyboard is my home, and I touch the mouse as little as possible. The keyboard is consistently faster, and I would urge you to put down your mouse, particularly if you’re a laptop user. The one exception is web-browsing; I’m still fairly mouse-focussed in this activity, particularly in my use of the context menu “Back” function instead of the “Back” button, but not to the extent of many users.
What does this have to do with search? Whilst Mac OS X has had desktop search (named “Spotlight”) since Tiger shipped in 2005, Windows took a little bit of time to catch up as Vista became delayed. Google Desktop Search filled the gap in the market somewhat on Windows XP, but the integration has never been as good as it was in OS X. The Vista search box in the Start Menu (accessibly by pressing [Flag] only) resolves that issue, and doubles as the Run dialog. Run is still available separately, however; I assume Microsoft identified a separate set of use cases for this feature.
All these search systems are dependent on an indexer running in the background, which scans selected files and directories and stores a trimmed-down version of their content and metadata (data describing the files and directories, such as name, size, dates, etc.) for fast access. The indexer is similar to the spidering process that Web search engines like Google use to discover web pages, images, etc., but it is more constrained than this as it’s only seeking information in the directories specified and not actively seeking new stuff wherever it might be. Vista also indexes your Start menu.
The upshot of the indexer is that searching your hard disk is near-instantaneous. Typing a search query into my search box in Vista returns results straight away, and it’s a matter of just a few seconds before the list of results is complete. Emails, documents, pictures, music, videos are all indexed and may appear in results. If I have a photo of JS Bach, MP3s of Bach Keyboard Partitas, and a paper written on Bach, and an email conversation regarding the proof-reading of that paper, each of those items will be returned in the list of search results for “Bach”.
Sadly, at work, I can’t get the full benefit of the search feature because of our corporate systems, but I’ve really started getting used to it at home. I no longer know where to find anything in the list of programs in my Start menu any more, as I just search for it. I don’t have to click Start -> All Programs -> iTunes -> iTunes to fire up iTunes; I just hit [Flag] and start typing “iT…”. By the time I’ve typed those two letters (and I’m a fast typer :-) iTunes has appeared as the top hit.
Search is built right into the Vista operating system, so if you’re a Vista user, you’ve probably used it in one form or another. Next time you’re rooting around for a file, try using the Start menu search function, or hit Ctrl+E in an Explorer window and see what it turns up.