Quick search for files on Windows
Quick search for files on Windows
Recently Linus talked about Windows file search and its speed in one of his videos. I've been using a 1 MB app named Everything for years to look through my files on Windows. It indexes over 3 million files on my laptop in under a minute, and once done, the search is almost instant. The index file is also quite small. How does Microsoft and Google manage this when a simple 1 MB app can do it perfectly?
Certainly organized items are listed, such as downloads and documents folders. It seems the reason they don’t index the entire system is that a typical non-technical person would get overwhelmed with files they don’t understand. That’s just my assumption.
Since everything is focusing solely on file names, Windows will explore files it recognizes (like txt, doc, xls, certain pdfs) and builds indexes for them. It handles a much larger amount of information to locate specific items. Still, Win10 searches often overlook more instances than Win7 did for me.
Windows can hide system files by default, and the search function looks through everything but takes a long time. By design, Windows doesn’t analyze file content unless you enable it, which makes the search algorithm very slow and the issue straightforward to resolve.
Yes, you can have the full content and the small index file searched together at once.