Finding Specific Information

Recent advancements in online and computer search technology have made the instant location of information and files so simple that it's easy to forget how tedious tracking down the same items would have been in the past. The Windows Search technology that is built in to Windows 7 is quite simply excellent. We touted the search capabilities in Windows Vista as one of its top three features, but the Windows 7 search engine is better.

Windows Search

Using Windows Search, you can find programs, files, messages, and message attachments on your computer almost instantly. You don't need to know the name or location of the file or item you want to find; simply type a word or phrase in the Start menu Search box to display a list of matching items, organized by type. To restrict your search to the contents of a specific folder (and its subfolders), display the folder in Windows Explorer and enter your search term in the Search box in the upper-right corner of the window.

How does Windows Search find items so quickly? Behind the scenes, Windows Search maintains an index of all the key words in, and associated with, the files stored on your computer-program names, common tasks, and the file names and content (when possible) of documents, audio and video recordings, images, e-mail messages, Web pages, and other data files. Windows Search automatically indexes the most common file types (such as Word documents, text files, and e-mail messages) and doesn't index file types you are less likely to search (such as operating system files). For certain types of files (such as PowerPoint presentations), Windows Search indexes the file properties and the file content, but for others (such as PowerPoint slide templates) it indexes only the file properties. (It does not include the system files; such an index would be huge and would slow down the search process.) When you enter a search term, Windows looks for the term in the index instead of searching the actual files on your hard disk.

Tip By default, Windows doesn't index encrypted files because a search by another computer user could reveal the encrypted data. You can add encrypted files to the search index if you first put in place a full-volume data-encryption solution, such as Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption. For information about BitLocker, see Windows 7 Step by Step Deluxe Edition, by Joan Preppernau and Joyce Cox (Microsoft Press, 2010).

If a simple search from the Start menu Search box or the Search box in a Windows Explorer window doesn't locate the item you are looking for, you can perform more advanced searches in the Search Results folder. Your search criteria can include the date a file was created, its size, part of its name or title, its author, and any tags you might have listed as properties of the file.

You can save a set of search parameters so that you can display updated results at any time. Saved searches are added to the Favorites group in Windows Explorer and are also available from your personal Searches folder.