Search like a pro

Searching in this manner gives you an advantage. You can, of course, simply hit the WIN key and begin typing your query, which quick and easy. This is great if you’re sitting at your gate in an airport terminal with your tablet or working on your paper at a coffee shop. At home, however, you might have several external hard drives or a desktop with more than one internal drive.

In the following screenshot, you can see that we have several additional data stores and all of them have folders and therein many subfolders.

In cases such as this we can add all these to the indexer or we could just go straight to the source and search directly in the appropriate location. Searching from the desktop will allow you to narrow your results appreciably and there are many tools that the desktop experience provides (such as Search Tools, which we’ll cover in this lesson) that will let you hone your queries for more exact results.

Searching from the Control Panel

While you can search from the File Explorer for files anywhere on your system, you can also search the Control Panel for settings. Remember back in Lesson 2 we discussed how to find settings from the Start menu by choosing the option from the dropdown menu or keying in WIN+W?

From there, you can key in the settings you want to locate, and Search will return both PC Settings and control panels in its results. Similarly, the Control Panel will also return settings but only the desktop versions.

You see in the above screenshot, we do a search for “system” and the Control Panel search returns every instance that contains that word. Keep Control Panel search in mind, it’s a pretty efficient way to find stuff so you don’t have to keep rummaging through all those control panels for the settings you want.

The Search Tools Ribbon

When you click on the Search pane in an Explorer window, the ribbon changes to Search Tools (we discussed the Ribbon in our Windows 8.1 series). Unless you’re doing simple searches with one or two terms (“control panel,” for example), you want to pay close attention to these tools, which let you quickly cut through your search clutter.

There are three section that appear when the Search Tools are activated: locations, refine, and options. Let’s talk about each one more closely.

Location

The first section, Locations, let’s you specify where you search and how deeply. For example, if you want to search your entire system, you can click “This PC” and your search will crawl through the entire computer.

If you choose a folder, which contains subfolders, then you can decide whether you want to limit search to the parent or Current Folder or have the search return results from all the subfolder.

Finally, if you’re conducting the same search in several locations across your system, you can conveniently search again in your Libraries or the Internet.

Refine

The Refine section is really your first foray into Advanced Query Syntax. Here you can refine your search according to four criteria: date modified, kind, size, and other properties. Let’s further discuss each one so you see how it’s laid out.

Date Modified

If you know when a file was modified, you can use this to narrow down your search. Using the date modified filter is a great way to narrow results down to a time-frame so that for example, if you know about when you modified a file, you can constrain your search so it doesn’t return results from an irrelevant time period.

For example, let’s say you have a series of articles that you wrote about one subject over the course of two years, but you know the one you’re looking for was written last year. You can use the date modified to constrain your results, so you only see files modified in the previous year. We will show you how to further pare down your results in the later section on the details view.

Kind

There’s a ton of different kinds of files on your system and, while you may know exactly what you’re looking, for you may not know exactly how to find it. By using the kind filter, you can quickly hone in on a certain file type and quickly drill through your results.

For example, you can search for videos, music, movies, and more. There are actually quite a few “kind” filters to choose from on this simple dropdown menu so you should check it out yourself!

Size

The size filter quickly makes short work of limiting your searches so that only certain-sized files appear in your search results.

You can refine you searches anywhere from empty files (0 KB) to gigantic files that are larger than 128 MB, and many places in between.

Other Properties

Finally there are various other properties that you can refine your searches. These properties will often vary according to a folder’s contents. For example, in the following screenshot, you can filter results by folder path, name, tags, and file extension.

However, in the next screenshot, we see a folder containing image files and as you will note that the other properties include date taken and rating.

If you are in a folder consisting of video files, you might see and additional “length” filter, and so on.

Options

The final section on the Search Tools are options that you can apply to help make your searches less tedious. Many of these options allow you to take the work out of performing frequent, repeated search, and as you’ll see, the Advanced Options give you some very convenient shortcuts to the same options we discussed in Lesson 1.

Recent Searches

A nice way to look for data in several to many different places is using the recent search feature. If you’re looking for a particular image or document and you have many different promising locations to search, you can use the same recent search over and over until you find it.

Saving Frequently Used Searches

In a similar vein to recent searches, you can also save frequently used searches for later, repeated use. Searches can be saved anywhere that is convenient for you but, by default, they are placed in your profiles under Searches.

It’s a good idea to give your saved searches a descriptive name, so you can easily apply them just in case you have a lot of them. You don’t want to have a whole bunch date modified searches grouped together because that could make things just as time consuming as simply browsing for files the old fashioned way.

Advanced Options

The advanced options give you immediate access to the options that we discussed in Lesson 1. So we don’t really need to cover how to use these options.

If you select “change indexed locations” for example, it will open the Indexer Options control panel and you can then modify what locations the indexer crawls.

Below this, you can see that you can add options such as those found in the Folder Options’ Search tab. So, if you want to search for the contents of a file, system files, or compressed files in non-indexed locations (options that will ultimately slow down searching), then you can quickly enable those options here.

Sorting Results with the Details View

When you initiate a search in a File Explorer window the results appear instantly. This can lead to dozens, if not hundreds, of results. If you’re looking at these results in an iconized view or tiles then you could spend a lot of time trying to find your file unless you know the trick to narrow your results down further.

We’re going to talk about Advanced Query Syntax in the remaining two lessons but we’re going to close out this lesson on how to sort and display results via the details view. Check out the screenshot below and see what we did. You’ll note that we did a search for “system” and that yielded quite a few results – 137 to be exact – which are highlighted in yellow.

In order to better slice through these results, the details view lets us sort columns by a number of criteria. So, if you wanted to sort everything by descending or ascending alphabetical order, you could do so by clicking on “name.” Similarly, if you’re looking for image files, you’d click on “type,” and so on.

That’s not all though, you can extend the functionality of these columns by clicking on the little arrow next to each. A menu will drop down and you’ll see even further filtering options (it might take a short bit for the computer to calculate the available filters in that folder).

In the first example, we see what happens when we want to filter by date, you see you can date or date range, or you can choose one of three additional filters below that.

If we select “earlier this year” we are shown a dramatically reduced list of results. You see we now only have 28 items to choose from and next to the “date modified” column there is a check mark to show there’s a filter applied.

We add one more filter, this time choosing “Windows Installer Package” from the list of file types filters that appear.

And now you can see that we’re left with one result. Note also on the Search Tools, you can use the same tools as before. You could, for example, choose to save your new search, add more filters, or search through further subfolders.

You’re not restricted to the columns that appear in the details view either. You can add other columns and even remove existing ones. Simply right-click anywhere on the details columns and you’ll be given quite a few more choices.

Click “More…” and you are given a list of dozens of more columns you can add and thus use to filter displayed results.

The chance that you’ll use any of these hidden columns is probably unlikely. Most of what you’ll find here is very specific and applies to a particular kind of file. For example, there are quite a few choices devoted solely to photographic image files which will rely largely on how much metadata is available in such files.

Similarly, there are quite a few items that apply to contacts, such as addresses, postal codes, and things like that. Rather than activating these columns just to satisfy such a focused search, you could simply use Advanced Query Syntax, which will let you find things using these same specific filters but with far fewer steps.

Search Options

The search options are on the Folder Options, which can be found in the Control Panel. The Search tab probably should be lumped into the Indexing Options but here they are instead.

The first option turns off the index when searching for system files in folders. Obviously, this won’t affect search if you are looking for stuff like images, documents, and videos, but if you want to find system files, search will be noticeably slower since they won’t be right there in the index.

If you’re conducting searches in non-indexed locations, let’s say you add another hard drive, then you can have your searches include system folders and compressed files. You can also have searches automatically include file names and contents. All these options, particularly the last one, will slow your searches down a bit.

Finally, if you’re unhappy with these options, you can restore everything to its defaults.

Before we end, note you can access these last three options immediately from the Search Tools ribbon. You can also open the Indexing Options control panel by clicking “Change indexed locations” so you don’t even need to leave the File Explorer!

Conclusion

That just about does it for today. You’re now fully prepared to assume your roles as Search Ninjas, but first we have to cover the previously mentioned Advanced Query Syntax. We’ll start teaching you all about that tomorrow starting with some basic stuff like Boolean and date operators.

In the meantime, we want you to do your homework. Take some time today to practice searches from the desktop. For instance, try out filters using the Refine tools on the Search Tools, as well as employing what you just learned about the details view.

Use Boolean, Dates, and Wildcards to Give Your Searches a Boost

Finding your stuff with Windows Search doesn’t require you know or even care about Advanced Query Syntax, but if you have 1000s of images, music files, and videos, then it sure helps. AQS really shines when you’ve saved your stuff in a safe place but can’t remember where that place is, so even if you’ve lost something, it’s never really lost if you know how to look for it!

The whole point of AQS is to help users “better define and narrow their searches.” In this lesson, we’re going to briefly introduce you to AQS but the focus of this chapter will be to teach you tools you can use to further extend your searches and get more definitive results, which will logically lead into our last lesson about AQS parameters.

These tools include Boolean operators, date operators, and wildcards. You can most definitely search without these tools, and that may be enough to find what you’re looking for, however, things like Boolean and wildcards really enhance searching and speed up file finding greatly especially if you’ve a lot of stuff stored or archived.

Let’s Talk About Boolean Operators, Again

We mentioned Boolean operators earlier in this series, now let’s talk about it in greater detail. Boolean allows you to combine search operators to narrow or broaden your results. For example, you can constrain a search with NOT. For example, you could search for all image files but NOT bitmap files. On the other hand, you could search for music files OR image files, meaning that your search will return results with both file kinds.

Let’s walk through some Boolean operators so you know how they work. Note, Boolean operators should be fully capitalized and you cannot use NOT and OR in the same query.

You can actually create a search using only Boolean. Let’s create an example, we want to find a file, created after October 31, 2012 with the phrase “How-To Geek”:

Searching through our Documents folder we’re given four results dated after October 31, 2012 with “How-to Geek” somewhere in the name or folder. That should be pretty easy to understand. The best thing about Boolean is that it works best when combined with AQS search parameters.

And, Boolean Properties

You can also find certain file types using Boolean properties. Let’s look at these properties and show you how they work. The following table is pasted directly from Microsoft’s documentation on AQS with some minor tweaks to make it geekier.

We’re not going to spend any meaningful time on Boolean properties. They are most useful such as when searching through Outlook, which is beyond the scope of this series.

However, if you do use Outlook, once you’ve read this series, you should be able to apply Boolean properties on your own to more easily find messages, especially if you have thousands and aren’t sure how to find the one you’re seeking!

A Quick Note on Dates

Let’s turn our attention briefly to dates. We described how to use Boolean to return results based on dates, either before or after a certain date or between two dates. You can actually take this quite a bit further and use relative date and day values.

This should be pretty easy to understand. Let’s try an example so we can make sure it’s firmly in your mind. Let’s say we want to search to see what we wrote in the last month, in this case June 2014. We could write the date range out like “date:‎6/‎1/‎2014 .. ‎6/‎30/‎2014” but that takes a bit more time. It’s much easier to write “date:last month” and get the following result.

Granted, if you wanted to constrain your results for months beyond June, you’d have to use the range function. Then again, knowing the relative date values can ultimately help you cut a few corners and save time.

Also, remember you can further refine your results by using other search operators such as titles and keywords. Let’s say that we want to see all the files in our Dropbox that were created in the last year with “geek school” in them.

If we simply search for files created in the last year, we’re shown almost 1300 results and if we search only for “geek school” we’re overwhelmed with around 1100 results. But if we combine the two search operators, we see how quickly we can narrow down our results to 52 items:

So, to sum up, you can use Boolean to find files by date following a number of methods. You can find files before (<) or after (>) a certain date, you can file files created during a time period or range of dates (..), and you can use relative values such as we just described (last week, last month, last year).

Wildcards

Wildcards are symbols you can use when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for but can almost guess. There are two wildcards supported in Windows Search: “*” and “?”.

Wildcard *: Searching for Unknown Strings

Using an asterisk allows you to replace a string of text. This is often useful if you know what kind of file you’re looking for but don’t know where it is. For example, let’s say you want to find a .jpg file that may be in a folder, which contains further subfolders. You could open each folder and sort the contents by its type in the details view. Or, you could use the * wildcard.

Obviously, trying to find one particular .jpg from almost 9000 items is going to take a lot of time, so you’d most definitely want to use other search operators to narrow your results. Like we mentioned, however, the * wildcard is used to replace a string of text.

So, in the following screenshot, we search for “image*.jpg” and are shown all instances of image files starting with “image” and ending with “.jpg”:

Obviously, 6308 files is still a lot, but it’s a lot less than 9000 and it does illustrate how the asterisk wildcard works. Let’s now look at how the question mark wildcard works.

Wildcard ?: Searching for Unknown Characters

Simply, the wildcard ? lets you replace it for any character in a search. This means that if you’re looking for a file and you’re not sure how it is spelled, you can simply substitute “?” for the characters you don’t know.

In the following example, we search for files that start with “img_2” and end with “.jpg”.

We’re unsure which three numbers follow so we substitute it with question marks. Of course, you could insert a * here, but if you do that, you’ll get results with more and less than three characters. In this case, we’re specifically looking for files with three characters between “2” and “.jpg”.

Let’s look at one more example, this time combining both wildcards in one search. In this screenshot, we want to search for Led Zeppelin mp3s but we’re not sure exactly how it’s spelled. Is it “Led” or “Lead” at the beginning? Is it “Zeppelin” or “Zeppelen?” Let’s try a wildcard search for “*zeppe???.mp3”and see what happens.

You see in this example, the * takes the place of the first three or four characters. In this case, it replaces “Led_”, while the three question marks at the end replaces what turns out to be “lin” and not “len.” Note also, we amend the end of the search with .mp3 so it is constrained to that type of file. If it weren’t, we’d likely also see images and text files as well.

So that’s it for wildcards. We think they’re pretty easy to understand and extraordinarily useful in a search pinch. Let’s delve briefly into actual AQS parameters before we conclude today’s lesson.

An Introduction to Advanced Query Syntax

When you use AQS, you can narrow your searches using four parameters. We just want to make sure you’ve got this firmly in mind before we unveil tomorrow’s lesson.

Stores

You can use AQS to search locations such as specific folder or you can query databases such as Microsoft Outlook data files. These are known as file stores.

Kinds

Use AQS to search for kinds of files, which can be anything such as documents, image files, spreadsheets, and more. File kinds are one of the more frequently-used parameters you will employ when conducting proper searches.

Properties

File properties are the things that describe a file such as its size, the date it was created/modified, its titles, and more.

In the above screenshot, we see the properties sheet for an mp3. On it we see the type of file it is, its location, size, and dates (created, modified, and accessed). These are “common” properties and can be found on any file.

There are also “specific” properties, which apply only to a certain file’s type. For example, in the case of our mp3, we can also search for bit rate, artists, genre, album name, and more. The same holds true for communications, video files, recorded TV, pictures, contacts, etc.

Contents

You can use contents searches to search your files for certain keywords. Content searches are applicable to files that contain text, such as documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and other similar file kinds. You can’t really search for images, videos, and music unless you have extra information (metadata) written to that file which can be located from the properties.

Text files are an excellent example. Let’s say we have a bunch of text files, and we want to search for instances of “to be or not to be” or maybe we just want to find Hamlet. Because “to be or not to be” is contained within Hamlet’s content, we can simply search for that phrase and it will be shown in the results.