Search in Windows XP

Search in Windows XP suffered from the following issues and limitations:

• Using the Search Companion to search for files was often a slow process. As a result, users often had to spend much of their time organizing their data into hierarchical sets of folders to make information easier to find through folder-specific searches.
• Searching for text within files required enabling the Indexing Service (Cisvc.exe) on the computer, and by default this service is stopped and set for manual startup.
• The Indexing Service, when enabled, tended to be intrusive in its operation by being CPU and input/output (I/O) intensive, which sometimes interfered with other user activity on the system.
• E-mail search capabilities in applications such as Microsoft Office Outlook were not integrated with how search and indexing worked in Windows.
• The search query syntax was limited in scope and capabilities. Specifically, there was no support for keywords, such as From:, and the Indexing Service was restricted to file content.