Why Windows 7 search is the way it is, and what lies ahead? Microsoft explain

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.