Windows Search Problems

 

The Windows search utility allows you to search for a text string in the file name, or in the contents of the file itself. This help file details the problems that Windows Search has with searching for text within a file:

Major Flaw1 - Does not Search Unregistered File Types

Search does not work at all with unregistered file types - as far as searching for text within a file !!! For example, I created a text file, "temp1.ken" with one word, "hello" in it. Windows search would not find the file when I looked for the word "hello". Of course, it will find all files by their file name - even unregistered ones.

The workaround - use "Turbo Seracher v2"


Major Flaw2 - Does not search Code !!!

Search works fine with registered file types that are expected to contain text - such as txt, htm, doc files, etc - and can even find special characters such as <&%#$, etc. But the characters must be part of what you would see when you open the file - NOT the code, which is hidden from the user !! The only way you can make it search the code, is to temporarily rename all the file extensions to a "txt" extension, do the search, and then rename them all back - but that is too difficult !!

As an example of this flaw, consider the following web page, "temp1.htm", saved on your C drive:
The HTML code is:

<head>
<title>My Message</title>
</head>
Hello

The user sees the word "Hello" in the body of the web page, and on the top title bar, he sees the words "My Message". Now let's do a few Windows searches on the C drive:

As you can see, the HTML code it not searched at all - only the text that the user sees is looked for.

Unfortunately, there are times you need to search for the hidden characters, especially with htm files. For example, if you have titled a lot of web pages on your site as "Volleyball", and want to change their title to "Sports". You don't remember which ones have the title Volleyball, so you must do a text string search - but you can't simply search for the word "Volleyball" because that word exists in tons of your web pages.  So instead, you need to search the actual html code for the text string: 

<title>Volleyball</title>

This would pinpoint all files on your site that have that title. But Windows Serach will not find any of them, because the Search utility only looks at the text that the user "sees", and not the code.

The workaround - again, use "Turbo Searcher v2" - which is much more powerful, and does search the entire text.