The onward march of Microsoft’s Bing search engine is slow but consistent.  While it is not showing any major market-share gains it still grew by 1.1% last month and now sits with 13.1% overall market share.

This growth still places Bing in third place behind Yahoo! but as the second-placed search engine only holds a 16.1% market share things look to change before the end of the year.

The search giant Google still maintains a massive 65.6% market share and this will be tough to beat, but some commentators are likening the current search engine war to the browser wars.  Here Microsoft had a 90+% share for years but this has now been eroded significantly.  Bing’s gain is Google’s loss though as the search giant lost 1% of its market share in the last month to Bing.

Should this be maintained, which is pure speculation at this point, but a 12% loss to Google and an equivalent gain to Bing in the next twelve months would be very significant.

Bing certainly has advantages that, so far, Google haven’t been able to match.  If they can continue this then their market growth could prove exponential.  Fear not though Google fans as the search giant will take every opportunity to fight back.

The best part of all this is that while Bing and Google are adopting different strategies to search with Google maintaining it’s traditional rankings system while Bing tries a more predictive approach there will still be a variety of ways to find what we want online, and this can only be a good thing.

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Last week Google’s Vice-President of Engineering hit out at Microsoft’s new smartphone operating system, Windows Phone 7, saying that “the world doesn’t need another platform…I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons.”

Now it’s the turn of the company’s CEO Eric Schmidt who has said “The hours I spend reprogramming my PC in Windows 7 is not a very good use of my time”.

So why are Google being so negative about Microsoft when other companies like Apple are sitting quietly aside?

Clearly Micorosoft is a hugely profitable company with a great many products and product areas that directly bring revenue into the company.  Apple is the same with a great many product areas from servers to MP3 players that again bring in revenue.  They may not have as many product lines as Microsoft or the same market share but they’re doing extremely well.

Google on the other hand have a great many products that don’t bring in any revenue whatsoever, in fact almost all of Google’s revenue still comes from advertising.  It’s no great surprise then that Google’s executives are worried about some of the recent projects from Microsoft that clearly and directly threaten them.

When Windows XP muscled Linux off netbooks Google, quite correctly, saw an opportunity to bring in a netbook-focused operating system.  The problem here is that they’ve taken so long to produce it that the netbook market is now on its way out and has already begun evolving into a new tablet market, for which their Chrome OS isn’t quite so well suited, not without yet more work anyway.  In the time it’s taken for them to produce pretty-much nothing, Microsoft has very successfully moved Windows 7 into their target market and is doing very nicely out of it too, with all netbooks now shipping with the latest Microsoft OS.

Then there was the launch of Bing which has been gaining market share steadily since it’s launch just over a year ago and that now threatens Google in such a significant way that Google have had to attempt to copy some of Bing’s features in order to try and hold on to market share.  Bing will soon be launching an HTML5 search engine too and Google simply don’t have anything to compete with it.  They’ve just stood still in search.

Now there’s the launch of Internet Explorer 9 which is very reminiscent of Google’s own Chrome browser but do Google have anything to compete with it?  Quite the opposite, changes to Chrome are now few and far between and more people than ever are complaining about bugs in the software.  Unless something major happens here Google will lose out here too.

Let’s compare and contrast with Apple who over the same period have been innovating, exciting consumers and the press and launching wave-after-wave of fantastic new products in both new and existing markets for the company.  Clearly Apple have nothing to worry about.

You can probably guess where I’m leading with this by now.  The negativity coming from Google Executives has nothing to do, frankly, with any of Microsoft’s products and everything to do with Google’s complete inability to innovate, motivate and excite.  They have even missed an opportunity to scupper the Windows Phone 7 launch with Chrome OS news, something the tech-press would have been much more interested in.

So please, unless you have something new, exciting or interesting to say, shut up Mr Schmidt!

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Microsoft and Yahoo! have unveiled the details of their collaboration on Internet search with the new Search Alliance website.  This is the result of a deal made earlier in the year where Microsoft agreed to provide the Bing search engine for Yahoo! search.

The website details how the two companies will work together and how they will still be competing.  This is important in order to assuage any fears Google people might have over the deal proving anti-competitive.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will work together:

• Search ad inventory from Yahoo!, Microsoft and their respective partners will be combined into a new unified search marketplace.
• Microsoft will acquire an exclusive 10-year license to certain Yahoo! search technologies.
• Microsoft will manage the technology platforms that deliver the algorithmic (powered by Bing) and paid (powered by adCenter) search results.
• Full implementation of the terms of the Search Alliance is expected to occur within 24 months following regulatory clearance.
• Yahoo!’s Sales team will exclusively support high volume advertisers, SEO and SEM agencies, and resellers and their clients, and Microsoft will support self-service advertisers. In addition, Microsoft adCenter will be the platform for all search campaigns.

How Yahoo! and Microsoft will compete:

• The Yahoo! and Microsoft Search Alliance does not include each company’s display advertising, web properties and products, email, instant messaging, or any other aspect of the companies’ businesses.
• Each company will maintain its own separate display advertising business and sales force.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will innovate their own consumer search experiences to compete for search users and search queries.
• Yahoo! and Microsoft will service their respective publishers, also known as affiliate search partners.
• Yahoo! will continue to syndicate its existing search affiliate partnerships.

 There is a huge volume of information on the website including a very helpful FAQs section.  This is if special interest to people who advertise using Microsoft’s or Yahoo!’s services.

The FAQs try to answer the question of who will be the winner with this search deal…

We believe that combining the strengths of Yahoo! and Microsoft to create a competitive choice in search with the scale to fuel sustained development is good for both companies, good for advertisers, good for consumers and good for our partners.

There can be no doubt that Bing is an excellent search engine and that now, with Yahoo! using it, Google will have a real fight on their hands.

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It’s only been live for a year, but Microsoft’s Bing search engine has now cornered 12.7% of the search market as reported by the BBC.  Google conversely has lost some market share, though not much, and now sits as 62.6%, down from 63.7% a year ago.  Yahoo! is sitting on 18.9%

“There is something that we are doing that is clearly resonating but that said we are a low share player,” Satya Nadello of Microsoft’s online division told BBC News.

This is clear given Google’s recent addition of a photo feature for their main search page, similar to Bing’s photo of the day.

Microsoft added “But we definitely wouldn’t be in it if we were not going to play to win.”

Google is entrenched in the search market with the term Google even being recognised as a verb in the same way that Coke and Hoover have managed in the past.  This will help Google maintain a lead, but a climb to 12.7% in just twelve months must have Google worried.

The reason for this is that Google give all of their products and services away for free, their revenue stream comes from advertising and that relies on search.  The rise of Microsoft’s Bing search engine is a serious threat to Google as a company.  Microsoft’s business model however isn’t based on giving things away for free.

Where the search engines will sit in another twelve months remains to be seen but it’s clear that Bing still has market share to grab.

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“Seek and ye shall find“. This should be the motto of Windows 7 Search as this is what is does very efficiently.

Using Advanced Query Syntax

You can use Advanced Query Syntax. Now that’s a mouthful! What on earth does mean? Putting it simply it means “using certain keywords to refine the search query”.

There is a huge range of keywords available and for full information about this check out these two web sites.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb266512%28VS.85%29.aspx#wildcards

and

www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/technicalresources/advquery.mspx

Keep these points in mind when Searching

Restrict your searches using a range of keywords which will limit your query to:

• Search using Wild Cards (* and ?)
• Search by File Types (located throughout your Hard Drive)
• Search using Common File Properties
• Search in Specific Locations
  • Libraries (Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos and Downloads)
• Searching for Specific File Kinds
• Seaching by Specific Dates (Date/ Week/Month/Year)
• Searching using Boolean Filters

Searching using Wild Cards

To search for a group of files or to carry out a more general search you can use wild card characters. they are two wildcard characters are:  *and ?

• The * symbol stands for any number of characters.
• The ? symbol stands for a single character.

Wild Cards can be used to search for files in the following ways:

Searching by Files Types

These are located in many places on your hard drive.

Searching using Common File Properties

You can limit your search to specific types of files, which are called kinds. The table below shows you some examples of searching by Kind.

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A year ago, before I joined Windows 7 News, I published an article entitled “Windows 7 and the Death of Search” in which I criticised the new search facility in the then forthcoming Windows 7.

There are a great many reasons why this new way of searching came about, and why Microsoft changed it from the multi-level drop-down search of Windows XP.  I said…

You’ll see that with Windows 7 it’s immediately considerably more difficult to do a contextualised search.  It’s still possible but you need to type text commands, and who is going to remember those?  I’ll publish a complete list in my Windows 7 Power Users Guide.

I did, it’s a shame that I had to, and in the next few days I’ll release that part of the book as a free download for you here.

Dan Plastina, the then group manager for “Find & Organize” in Windows 7, and the man responsible for leading the team that developed the libraries and the keyword search in that operating system, was quick to reply to my article.

For the masses, the biggest issue is one of users not discovering search features at all. In addition, the telemetry data we have indicates that keywords search is — by an extreme margin — the dominant type of search. Saved searches are not used that much (by the masses).

What he was saying is that search engines ever since the birth of the internet, have over-simplified the way we search for things.  In the beginning the internet wasn’t that large so a simple keyword-based approach was logical, but as the net expanded people had become used to this keyword-based approach so, while companies like Google still offer an advanced search for those who want it, engines like Bing took a different approach, trying to make the keyword search work smarter.

This approach was melded into Windows out of necessity, because we search for things on-line much more often than we do on our own PCs.  Microsoft offered two ways to search.  The keyword contextualising approach offered in the Start Menu and Explorer windows, and the Advanced Query Syntax (AQS).

A lot of the people who left comments on my original article over the last year however felt that these were the two extremes of what they were really after, and that the middle ground, better represented by the way you could search in XP, hadn’t been catered for.

Dan and I have been discussing Windows search on and off for the last year and, as I came to write this follow-up article he jumped in with more detail about Microsoft’s position.

I do hear your points so I don’t want to dismiss those. What I am suggesting though is that if you look at the problem from the angle of the masses – the typical Windows user – then you’ll see that they too can now do the powerful searches without having to know that the ‘advanced query syntax’ exists. This is a big win for the vast majority of the users.

I’d characterize this as Windows 7 having improved upon the path (slight detour?) taken by Vista with: Improved keyword search and broadened search scopes (e.g.: the control panel tasks from the start menu; HomeGroup search, all locations included in libraries, etc. ); a cleaner, more self-consistent Explorer experience over Vista; and the addition of search filter building for the ‘masses’.

I do also agree that Windows Vista did remove some of the more targeted search capabilities that existed in Windows XP. Windows 7 built mostly on the direction set by Vista, right or wrong.

Now I’m going to be fair and say that there’s a lot to like about the way Windows 7 searches for information.  The way it drills down into files and the multitude of ways that search results can be presented are extremely useful.  I’m hoping though that significant improvements are still made for Windows 8.

For example…  Should you wish to search your files and documents for PDF and Word files you, according to logic would type type:(pdf AND doc), but this won’t work.  Instead typing type:(pdf OR doc) will produce the results you require, logical OR = English ’and’.  The kind: command can also be used in this instance to search for all the main document types.

Clearly there are ways in which the AQS can be improved to both make it both more powerful and more intuitive.  Adding more of the helpful drop-down search filters when you begin a search would be a very useful addition for many, but you have to know at what point you draw the line.  Microsoft freely admit however that search in Windows 7 isn’t perfect and was such a departure from what was seen in Vista, that getting it right in a single release would be unlikely.  Some steps are just too big to take in one release!

Libraries are also an area where significant work can be done with Windows 8.  At the moment they are a straight replacement for the old shell folders from XP (Documents, Music etc) with the ability to add extra folders to them should you wish.

If this feature was further expanded and blended with the saved searches that were introduced with Vista, then we could have libraries of PDF files or files created by you at work.  Here we would have a genuinely powerful tool for organising files on our PCs.  Shell folders could be gone forever.

If you look at the way search works in the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 operating system we can perhaps see the beginnings of a more logical approach to search.

Performing a search in this OS will bring up panels titled “Web, Local, News” and so on, categorising your search results in helpful and meaningful ways.  It’s only a matter of time before this works its way into the main Bing search engine, and it’s a logical progression from the aggregated and contextualised search in Windows 7, indeed this is already the way that the Start Menu displays search results to you.

What the future holds for search at least is currently unclear.  Whether it lies in contextualised keyword-based search, an improved AQS, a drop-down entry system reminiscent of XP or any combination of the above remains to be seen.

So now we wait.  The good news is that I genuinely believe that Microsoft have taken on board the criticisms that I (and others) have made about the search and organise features in Windows 7.  The way the company structures updates now makes it unlikely that any revisions will find their way into this current version of the OS, but Windows 8, if done right, could revolutionise the way we interact with the documents on our PCs.

Why Windows 7 search is the way it is, and what lies ahead? Microsoft explain was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

No doubt by now you know how useful Search is for finding files on your computer but did you know you can also use it for other tasks?

Besides searching for missing files, Search also provides you with the quickest way to:

• Open an application
• Find information
• Access Windows 7’s Troubleshooters

Here are just a few additional uses of Search.

Scenario 1       Opening an Application

You want to open an application in a hurry but there’s a problem.

• You haven’t added its icon onto the Taskbar.
• There is no shortcut icon on your Desktop.
• You are uncertain where it is located in All Programs menu.

So, what do you do? Well, luckily you remember its start-up command. Let’s see if Search can help. We’ll use WordPad as the example.

1. Click the Start button and in the Search box, type wordpad.
2. WordPad appears at the top of the Search box under Program.
3. Press the Enter key.
4. WordPad opens.

Scenario 2      Finding Information

Suppose you want information about “fonts”. Search can help you get the necessary information  just as well as Help and Support can. In fact in some ways its even better as it scans for all relevant information on your computer.

1. Click the Start button.
2. In the Search box, type Fonts.
3. Search opens displaying every piece of the information available on your computer. As you can see there are many sources Search has found. Besides finding what you would normally expect, it has also picked three websites where I looked at fonts. Obviously I’d forgotten this, as I must have saved the information. The sites I’m referring to at listed as .mht files.
   

   Search Results window

Note: If you select “See more results” you will find additional sources. In the example below Search has picked up emails and pictures also.

More details after clicking "See more results"

Scenario 3      Access a Troubleshooter

Windows 7′s Troubleshooters can help you in many different situations. Finding the right one can be tedious so let’s use Search to access them. One common problem many users have is with old games software. It worked well under Windows XP but not with Windows 7. This is where a troubleshooter may help.

1. Click the Start button and in the Search box, type troubleshooting.
   
2. In the top of the Search box, you’ll see Troubleshooting.
3. Press the Enter key.
4. The Control Panel opens displaying a list of possible Troubleshooting problems ranging from Programs to System and Security.
   

   Search locates Troubleshooters

5. The top Troubleshooter in the list, “Run programs made for previous versions of Windows” may provide the answer.
6. Select the blue text and click.
   

   Select and Click to open the Troubleshooter

7. When the Troubleshooter commences follow the screen prompts, clicking Next to proceed to the next stage. Hopefully, Windows 7 will provide a solution to your problem.

So there you have it! Search offers many ways to help.

A Few Different Uses for Windows Search was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

Business firms that have moved to Windows7 have had different experiences after the fact; but their reasons for moving to Windows7 have also been varied. Here we look at some successful moves and what convinced the business unit to make the move.

Windows 7

Gameware  is a company sells team-branded bracelets, necklaces, key chains, and MP3-player, cell-phone and smartphone cases that are made from the same leathers and stitching used to make baseballs, basketballs and footballs. For Gameware, which had thousands of documents and images, misplacing any of them could create retrieval issues. But the Windows7 search feature made that problem disappear. Now looking for documents, images, or audio feeds can be easily located. Gameware

Gameware - Product by Sport - By Team - By Occasion

Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky is a New York based law firm that moved to Windows7 in large part because of the Aero features offered in Windows 7. Having the ability to work with multiple windows simultaneously adds to their productivity. That is one thing that this law firm wanted – to compress operation time so that legal documents to work with would be accessible quickly.

Dewey Pegno & Kramarsky LLP - Litigation Law Firm - New York City

Essential Apparel is an online retailer, and the fact that there were no required hardware updates made the upgrade to Windows 7 an easy decision.

Essential Apparel - Clothes for Men - Women - Kids

According to Bob Mayer, Essential Apparel’s president “… because Windows 7 can run on the same PCs we were using for Windows XP, moving to Windows 7 effectively extended the useful life of our older PCs.” Touch and search also had an influence on the decision. To date, Mayer estimates that they have saved $20,000 this year in capital spending.

The many features of Windows7 have provided different businesses with the reasons to upgrade, but it is the customizability of the product that encourages users to look for new ways to work and be productive.

Source: Microsoft PressPass

Windows7 Success Stories: An Online Retailer – A Law Firm – A Sports Apparel Maker was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

Resident editor Mike Halsey has just published on Windows 7 News, the latest post in his series ‘Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows‘.  In part 5, he covers improvements he would like to see to Windows 7′s libraries and search  in Windows 8:

I’ve spoken before about Libraries being an excellent example of this. You can add folders to libraries, even on Homegroup connected PCs, but why can’t you filter those folder by content type, or have a library of all your Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) files? This is a very annoying omission and one that makes the otherwise excellent Libraries feature much less useful than Microsoft would like it to be.

To read the full post, click here.  Below you can find links to the earlier instalments in the series:

• Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows, Part I
• Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows, Part II
• Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows, Part III
• Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows, Part IV

Looking Forward To Windows 8, What Microsoft Missed In Windows 7, Part 5 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written one of these articles and in the interim Windows 7 has been launched a much applauded by the press and public.  I too have warmly received Windows 7, mostly because I was using either the irritating and sluggish Vista, or the insecure XP before.

But now that we’re about a month in I believe it’s time for the Windows 7 bashing to continue if we’ve got any hope of getting the Windows 8 we all need and deserve.

The problem with Windows 7 is that, in many areas, it was rushed.  Microsoft did not take a holistic approach to developing the operating system, it’s features and it’s interface.

I’ve spoken before about Libraries being an excellent example of this.  You can add folders to libraries, even on Homegroup connected PCs, but why can’t you filter those folder by content type, or have a library of all your Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) files?  This is a very annoying omission and one that makes the otherwise excellent Libraries feature much less useful than Microsoft would like it to be.

Another example I’ve spoken about is search.  The search facility in Windows 7 is awful.  Just compare this to the search facility we first saw in Windows XP, with helpful drop-downs and context sensitive search.  You can’t search by multiple parameters at all in Windows 7, and the search commands themselves are so complex that even the most hardened Windows 7 user will only ever use a small fraction of them because you need to carry a paper list around with you.

But there’s one bug bear that’s recently been truly annoying me and that’s the context menus when you click on a file.

What is missing in this menu?  With Windows 7 Microsoft have introduced the new ‘superbar’ onto which you can pin programs for easy launch and so they’re easier to find.  Now let’s set aside for a moment that friends have all said to me that A) You could do this in XP and Vista with the quick launch area anyway and B) That this is an acceptance on Microsoft’s part that the Start Menu is no longer an acceptable way to find and use programs.

My problem is you you can right click on a program once you find it in the Start Menu and pin it to the taskbar, but you ought by the same logic be able to right click on a document and do the same.

This should, if the functionality were included, automatically pin the document to the jumplist for the program on your taskbar and, if the program is not already pinned to your taskbar, pin it there for you.

It’s an excellent example, if any more were needed, that Microsoft should have spent more time developing their new interface and functionality ideas.  We can only hope they take these ideas on board and spend a bit of time getting them right for the launch of Windows 8 in 2012.

Looking forward to Windows 8, what Microsoft missed in Windows 7, Part 5 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

Several articles have already been written about Search and how to use it. Check out these previous posts on Windows7News :

• “How to search in Windows” by Mike Halsey (Sept11)

• “Finding files in Windows7” by  Mustafa (June 30)

In my post I’d like to draw your attention to these aspects of Windows Search features.

They are:

• Registering a portable Drive in Search’s Index

• Excluding a Folder from Search

• Windows Search not working

In Windows XP Windows the Search feature was hopeless. While it improved in Windows Vista it now flies in Windows 7.Copernic Desktop Search is a much more effective Search application. This application is available from the web. You can access a free download at www.Copernic.com/download .

Of course, Google remains well ahead of the pack when it comes to searching for information on the Web.

What is Windows’ Index?

The core of Windows’ Search is Windows Index. Windows 7 collects information about all the files stored on your computer. Each file’s information is registered in the Index. This includes such information as the file name, the name of author, the location (folder) and so on. Whenever you create and save a file, Windows adds details about it to its index.

Windows uses this indexing system to perform very fast searches on your computer.

How does Search Work?

Search checks your library first. This includes these folders, Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos as well as Contacts and E-mails.

It also looks in Public Folders.

Troubleshooting with Windows Search

Search is not working very well? Maybe it’s time to give it a tune-up. Now this is where another of Windows 7’s useful Problem Solver can help.

1. Click the Start button.
2. In the Search box, type “search problem”.
   
3. Search offers a problem solver called “Find and fix problems with Windows Search”.
4. Click “Find and fix problems with Windows Search”.
   
5. The Problem Solver opens.
6. Click the Advanced heading in the lower section of the Search and Indexing window.

   

7. The window expands showing additional options.
8. Make sure the box against “Apply repairs automatically” is checked.

   

9. Then, click the Next button.
10. In the following window, there are four possible problem solutions offered under the heading “What problems do you notice?”.

    

11. Check the boxes which are relevant.
12. Click the Next button to continue.
13. The Problem Solver goes to work fixing the problem.
14. Search should now work the way you want it.

Registering a portable Drive in Search’s Index

While Windows Search regularly checks all drives on your computer indexing the contents, if you add an external hard drive to your system it will not be registered.

Let’s look at how to register this additional drive.

First of all, you need to access Indexing Options. There are two ways you can do this, the first way is to use Search itself and the second way is through the Control Panel.

The two methods to access this feature:

• Click Start >  In the Search box, type index > Select Indexing options > the Indexing Options window opens
• Click Start > Select Control Panel > In the Search Control Panel box (top right) type Indexing options > Select Indexing options > The Indexing Options window opens

Making Windows 7 Search Work Better was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

I thought I’d write you some guides on how-to do X, Y and Z in Windows 7 and one of the first things that jumped out at me is search.  Frankly, search in Windows 7 is awful!  It’s all text-based stuff that completely does away with both the friendly search that we’ve not seen since Windows XP, and also multi-level searching (both of which seem like a no-brainer to me).

Search is built into every aspect of Windows 7, and as we get more and more files, documents, photos, music and videos in our personal libraries it can become harder to find things, especially if we haven’t looked at them in a while.

Search in Windows 7 works in a contextual way depending on what you’re searching in.  For instance, search in the Start Menu will prioritise Start Menu items and programs, search in Explorer will prioritise documents and pictures, search in Internet Explorer will prioritise Favourite websites and browsing history and so on.

Alas, gone is the simple search of previous versions of Windows to be replaced by a more text-based search.  When you start a search a drop down will ask if you want to add a search filter.

There and a great many of these which I shall detail but the basic ones Name: and Type: for file name and file type respectively would be used in the format…

Type: pdf

…if you were looking for Adobe Acrobat files.  This is a way to help narrow down searches.

Kind: used to search the properties of a document type

Kind:email
Kind:tasks
Kind:notes
Kind:docs
Kind:music
Kind:song
Kind:folders
Kind:programs

Datemodified: to search by the date a file was modified

Datemodified:22/10/2008
Datemodified:22/10/08
Datemodified:yesterday
Datemodified:lastweek
Datemodified:pastmonth
Datemodified:27/03/03..1/4/08 

Type: to search by file type

Type:image
Type:.doc
Type:.pdf 

Name: searching by file name or by a property name for a file

Name:holiday
Name:wedding 

Unfortunately the search syntax doesn’t let you double-up on search terms.  For instance typing type:.docx, .pdf won’t bring up search results for all Word and PDF files.

I’ll publish a complete list of all the advanced search query syntax here soon, suffice to say there’s a huge amount of it and it’s nothing anyone really going to be able to remember day to day.

Microsoft really should have done better with search in Windows 7.  Fortunately there are alternatives, such as Copernic that still offer better search functionality.

How-to : Search in Windows 7 was posted on Everything Microsoft - Latest Microsoft News, Guides, Reviews & Themes. If you are not reading this content in an email newsletter, it is being used without permission.

“Where’s that document I used a few weeks ago?”

We’ve all come across this problem, where we can’t find a file. Microsoft claims that Windows 7 provides better ways to find and organize files. In Windows 7, searching is faster and works better than ever before. This guide shows 5 handy tips that can help you find that file you’ve been looking for within minutes and get the most out of Windows 7′s search.

1. Search Where Your File is Most Likely to Be

There’s no point of searching the whole of “My Documents” when you already know that the file is somewhere in the “Work” folder. So if you’d like to make searching faster, try reducing the number of places to search in by specifying the file’s location. How? Simply open the location in Windows Explorer and use the ”Search bar” on the top right of the window.

The location you search in doesn’t have to be very precise. The aim of this is just to avoid searching in places that you know for sure that the file can’t be in.

2. Use Wildcards in Your Search

This was available since Windows XP, yet a lot of people don’t really use it. A wild card is a character that is used to represent one or more unknown characters. The most common wildcards are the:

The asterisk (*) represents any number of alphanumeric characters, while each question mark (?) represents only one alphanumeric character.

3. “Search Filters”, a Very Powerful Feature

This feature is what (I believe) makes Windows 7′s search better than search engines in previous OS. Search filters allow users to search for a file using its details such as its size, date created, etc. These details can vary from one type of file to another. For instance, you can search for an MP3 file using the artist’s name or album. While search for a document by its author or tags. The following is the syntax of search filters:

property:data

For instance, if you’d like to find music with the genre (genre is the property) jazz and contains the word ’can’ in its filename, your search would be: genre:jazz can. There are MANY properties that you can use. For a full list of properties you can use, I strongly recommend you check Windows Search Advanced Query Syntax.

Also, operators can help you obtain more precise results. The following table shows the list of common operators that you can use in your search:

4. View before Opening

Let’s assume that you want to search for a document and know its location, but can’t remember any of its details. Thus, you type in the search bar kind:docs and Windows Search returns a list with all the documents in that location. Let’s say 20 search results are returned. You obviously don’t have enough time to go on opening each and every document until you find the one you’ve been looking for. Hence Windows 7 provides a panel called the “preview panel” to make life easier. The preview panel views the contents of the file when selecting it.

To show the “preview panel” simply click on the second item at the right top under the search bar as shown in the screen shot below:

5. Group the Search Results

After Windows 7 has finished displaying the search results, you might want to group the results found according to their details (such as their type, tags, date created, etc.) by right-clicking anywhere inside the window (without highlighting a search result) and then clicking on “Group by” to select the how you want to group the search results. If you’d like more details, click on “More…”.

If you need any help or would like to add anything, ask in the “Comments”.

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