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Configuring Search and Indexing Options (part 3) - Basic Search Techniques & Searching from the Start Menu

3/18/2011 10:05:16 PM

4. Basic Search Techniques

You can search wherever you see a search box. Specifically, that means the following:

  • From the search box at the bottom of the Start menu

  • From the search box in the upper right corner of any Windows Explorer window

  • From Control Panel

  • From a common file dialog box

Inside Out: What happened to the Search menu?

If you moved to Windows 7 from Windows XP, you'll no doubt notice that the Search option previously found on the right side of the Start menu is no longer available. That change was part of a voluntary settlement of a legal complaint brought by one of Microsoft's archrivals in the search business, Google. If you've grown to depend on a dedicated Search dialog box, press Windows logo key+F (Fas in Find). This opens the Search Home window—essentially an instance of Windows Explorer with an empty search box highlighted. A search you begin from here will include the entire search index and exclude all nonindexed locations. You can achieve the same result by entering a term in the search box on the Start menu, and then clicking the See More Results link just above the search box.


When you type in the search box on the Start menu, in a library, or in a homegroup location, the list of results is drawn from the search index. The list includes files whose names or properties contain the selected text; for files in formats that include appropriate property handlers and filters, the results will include items whose contents contain the text you entered. The scope of the search depends on your starting point. From the Start menu search box, you'll search the entire index, or you can restrict the scope to a specific location by selecting that location in Windows Explorer and using its search box.

The following rules govern how searches work:

  • Whatever text you type must appear at the beginning of a word, not in the middle. Thus, entering des returns items containing the words desire, destination, and destroy, but not undesirable or saddest.

  • Search terms are not case-sensitive. Thus, entering Bott returns items with Ed Bott as a tag or property but also includes files and e-mail messages containing the words bottom and bottle.

  • By default, searches ignore accents, umlauts, and other diacritical marks. If you routinely need to be able to distinguish, say, Händel from Handel, open the Indexing Options dialog box, click Advanced (you'll need administrative credentials), and then select Treat Similar Words With Diacritics As Different Words.

  • To search for an exact phrase, enclose the phrase within quotation marks. Otherwise, you'll be searching for each word individually.

5. Searching from the Start Menu

The search box on the Start menu has a dual personality. Its primary role is to help you find shortcuts to applications on the Programs menu and tasks in Control Panel. When you type a search term that matches any item in either of those locations, the results appear almost instantaneously. But this box also offers complete access to everything else in the search index: websites in your history folder; saved Favorites; messages in your e-mail store; appointments and contacts from Microsoft Outlook; any shared network folders that are included in any of your libraries; and, of course, files and folders in your file system.

Inside Out: Use the search box to find a website

If you start an entry in the Start menu search box with http: or www, Windows assumes, quite logically, that you're trying to find a webpage. In that case, the first result at the top of the search results list appears under the Internet heading. Searches from the local index appear beneath that result.


The search box (here and elsewhere) is a "word wheel"—which means that the search begins as soon as you start typing, and each new character you type refines the results. If you type the letters m and e into the Start menu search box, you'll see results for Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player, as well as the Windows Memory Diagnostic. You'll also see 42 Control Panel tasks (topped by Taskbar And Start Menu), e-mail messages to and from friends whose names begin with those letters (like Melissa and Merle), and any document that has the word me (or a word that begins with those two letters). The list gets considerably shorter if you continue typing.

Because the word wheel action is snappy and the Start menu search is optimized to find items on the Start menu, typing a few characters here can be a great alternative to hunting up a program shortcut from the All Programs section of the Start menu. Typing the word media into the search box, for example, produces a list like the one shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Start menu searches return categorized shortcuts to programs, Control Panel tasks, documents, and other items included in the search index.


The scope of a search from the Start menu box covers the entire index, including document files, folders, internet shortcuts, e-mail messages, objects on a Microsoft Office OneNote page, and more. Results are ranked and categorized, with the number of results in each category appearing in parentheses alongside the category heading. The initial display of results is limited to the space available on the left side of the Start menu, with each category limited, if necessary, to the top three results. If you're not sure what an item returned by the search is, you can hover your mouse over it and read a tip with more details about the item.

To see all results for a specific category, click the category heading. To see the complete set of results for all categories except Programs and Control Panel, click the See More Results link just above the search box. In either case, Windows Explorer opens and displays your search results in Contents view. Figure 6 shows the See More Results view for the Start menu search in the previous figure.

Figure 6. The Search Results window shows more details than the brief list of item names on the Start menu results list.


From this window, you can turn on the preview pane to view a document's contents without having to open it. You can also refine the search in a variety of ways. The most obvious of these refinements is the Search Again In list along the bottom of the file list. Start menu searches encompass the entire search index. You can rerun the search to look only in libraries or across other computers in your homegroup or on your computer only. Use the Custom link to hand-pick folders or libraries where you want to search, or click Internet to send the search terms to your default internet search page.

If you're unhappy with the results of Start menu searches, you have two customization options available. To control the reach of Start menu searches, right-click the Start button and choose Properties. On the Start Menu tab, click Customize. Finally, scroll down the Customize Start Menu dialog box until you reach the two settings that begin with Search. The Search Programs And Control Panel option is selected by default. To see only programs and Control Panel tasks, leave this setting unchanged and select Don't Search under the Search Other Files And Folders heading.

Inside Out: You can search for programs that aren't on the Start menu

Searching from the Start menu search box can be a good way to run a program that isn't on the Start menu—such as Registry Editor or an .msc console. The Start menu's search looks for executables in system folders that are not ordinarily indexed. Because the search engine's word-wheel feature works only with indexed locations, however, you need to type the full name before it appears in the search results. You also need to identify the program by the full name of its executable file, rather than its friendly title. Typing Registry Editor in the search box gets you nothing (unless you happen to have created a shortcut and saved it under that name). Typing regedit summons the program.
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