Desktop search tricks in Windows Vista
The desktop search function in Windows Vista is different from the one in Windows XP, supposedly for the better. However, not everybody likes the change. For one thing, at first glance, it doesn’t seem to have advanced search with filters like XP does. For example, how do you find files with certain extensions? You can just enter the file extension in the “Start Search” line but that may turn up more than files with that extension. For example if you enter “bat”, the search results will include any file with “battery” as well as batch files.
The solution is to use search operators but the problem is that most home PC users are not aware of these operators. Nobody tells you about them when you buy a Vista computer. I posted about Vista search operators previously but I gave no examples. There are a lot of operators and I think that many home users will find them too much to remember. However, in this post I am going to give a couple of common examples.
I often want to find all files of a given type so I search on the file extension. The operator for this is “filext:“. So if you want to find all the JPG files, enter “filext:jpg” in the Start Search line (omit the quotes, here and in examples below).
Another common search is to look for files created after a certain date. The operator syntax for this type of search is “date: >“. Thus, to search for files dated after February 10, 2009, enter “date: >02/10/09“. This being Windows, there is another way to do the same thing. You can use the operator “after:“. Thus you could enter “after:02/10/09“.
You can combine the operators to refine your searches even further. To search for all JPG files dated after February 10, 2009, enter “filext:jpg after:02/10/09“.
The Microsoft programmers didn’t seem to know when to stop. Instead of numerical dates, you can also use a whole collection of date terms such “today”, “tomorrow”, “yesterday”, “this week”, “next month”, “last week”, “past month”, “coming year”. And there’s more. You can use the names of the days of the week, Sunday, Monday, and so forth. And you can use the names of the months, January, February, etc. An example search might be “filext:jpg after:last week“. (Be careful using the weekday and month names. I think that they are restricted to the current week and the current year.)
To read about all the various search operators, go to this Microsoft blog.
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