> We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily – finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it.
It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engine, and Microsoft has resisted that, for some mysterious reason, for 30+ years.
What there are still people who don't install Voidtools' Everything on all Windows PCs and assign it a global shortcut? Since I have it I don't even bother organizing stuff
It's amazing. It does what Google Desktop tried and failed to do on Windows XP. And it's blazingly fast by reading NTFS directly instead of using the Windows API. (OK, back then needing 1GB of RAM was pretty much impossible.)
Does Everything search file contents? I've only used Everything for searching filenames (and it is fantastic for that). Google Desktop's sweet spot was searching within files.
The stable version cannot. 1.5 Alpha can do it. It can also index properties (as in resolution, author, song/movie length, etc.)
So far I would recommend that one, it has tons of new features (including a change journal that shows renames, moves and deletes in real time) and I didn't experience a single bug yet. And it is even faster.
Does anyone know of a similar tool for macOS? I'd gotten really comfortable with a Ctrl+Alt+S binding on Windows for Everything and miss it these days on macOS.
If you had it index everything you want to find it would do just that.
And be excruciatingly slow, unreliable and wasting Gigabytes of storage. All while consuming tons of CPU time in the background.
The idea of an indexing service is good though. KDE's Baloo faces similar issues. It's not that easy to make it a good experience.
Everything (mentioned in this thread) comes closest to being fast, reliable, and usable. It can even index external disks and search them while offline.
It always baffles me how long it takes for Windows to search for a file while the GNU's `find` command churns through filenames and paths like it's nothing.
Windows Everything finds any file globally in the blink of an eye, let's you sort in real time by size/date, live-edit your query, and also perform operations on the result in the list, so much better that any find
It's highly optimized, but it still needs quite a bit of RAM when the index is large. But RAM is cheap nowadays.
It's the only thing I really, really miss when I am on Linux. (there is FSearch, but it's not quite as great, yet)
Losing Google Wave, then Google Desktop search and then Google Reader like shot ducks in a row truly signified the death-knell of "Don't Be Evil" days.
It's really baffling, isn't it? A part of me wonders if Microsoft is simply unable to figure out how to make a good Windows search and so is looking for AI to do it for them.
But it seems like shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun.
Microsoft has tried to make a "better" search before, by redesigning the file system and the metadata that can be tied to files.
The idea was that you could search this:
> the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month
They had hyped this up as coming in Project Longhorn (which was eventually split into Vista and salvaged in Windows 7), but the new filesystem was eventually dropped like their other attempts:
They should implement simple search first, so I don't need to reach grep for everything. Then they should implement pdftotext and fuzzy search. Of course everything should work instantly for small folders. That would be enough for 99% people.
A million times this. Windows search is, as near as I can tell, completely worthless and I have to install other utilities to have working basic search.
I don't need or want anything fancy like semantic searching. I just want to be able to grep and find things by filename.
The server version called "Windows Search Services" was rather alright. It was even integrated into the Win7 Libraries and you could search through contents server-side from Explorer.
It supported plugins and was reasonably fast. Needed a lot of RAM though and some admin to babysit it.
It is less baffling when you consider decisions are not being driven by engineers. Investors don't want a search engine. Investors (and other non-engineers) want "AI"
I don’t understand why you say it doesn’t need AI. It’s like saying a financial application doesn’t need a database. Maybe it can use something else, but who cares what technology is used as long as it’s good? I’m willing to believe that AI is making this tech much more effective
There is locate32, which also builds an index, but then is blazingly fast. Windows does build an index too, but it doesn't feel like it uses it in any way.
It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engine, and Microsoft has resisted that, for some mysterious reason, for 30+ years.