Microsoft is Testing a Cortana 'File Skill' To Find Files Faster in Windows 10 (pcworld.com) 45
Cortana may not be the personal assistant she once was, but a new update as part of the Windows Insider Dev Channel means that her capabilities to find files have improved. From a report: The new "File Skill" in the Cortana app appears in the new Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 20270, part of the Dev Channel. (Dev Channel releases publish test code that may or may not end up in a future release.) In this experimental app, Cortana's skills have been honed to the point where she can find files in the cloud, with a better understanding of what you're looking for. If your PC is enrolled in the Windows 10 May 2020 Update or later, some of these capabilities will already be available. As long as you have speech recognition enabled on your PC, you can ask Cortana "find my recent files," and it should unearth the last two or three files you've used on your PC. What Microsoft is trying with Cortana in this beta is the ability to search corporate SharePoint and OneDrive files stored in the cloud on a work account. (You'll need to be signed into a work account, too.)
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:more impressive would be (Score:5, Insightful)
While we're at it why don't they just fix Windows search? Nothing more infuriating than typing in the name of a system utility verbatim and getting unrelated results.
Re:more impressive would be (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, please.
Especially when you type the name of it verbatim and not only get unrelated results, but the utility you want isn't the first thing in the results and you end up opening up some random Windows Store app listing or webpage that kind of matches.
The last version of Windows with a usable search function was Windows 7. (And by usable, I mean usable. Not good.) In Windows 10, I generally find it more effective to fire up WSL and use find and grep.
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While we're at it why don't they just fix Windows search?
Yep, surely this can be done with a mouse and a UI button.
Would work on all PCs, won't annoy the neighbors, no "Cortana" or "microphone" or "speech recognition" needed.
Re:more impressive would be (Score:4, Informative)
I agree, but even at its best Windows Search was mediocre.
[fanboy mode] I highly recommend Everything.exe (https://www.voidtools.com/ ) - instant (really!) find-as-you-type searching of your entire computer (or any subset you configure) Blows anything Microsoft has ever done out of the water without even trying. Takes a bit of memory, but not that bad for what it provides - 142MB to index the 2.2 million files on my computer.
It only searches by file name, but that's mostly not an issue. And if you make a habit of giving your personal files long descriptive names with lots of keywords it'll let you find them, and several potentially related files, anywhere on your computer, considerably faster than you could navigate to the folder where you thought you saved them. Just typing a few 3-letter sequences from different words is generally enough to winnow down my 2-million file list to a small handful of matching files.
Re:more impressive would be (Score:5, Interesting)
While we're at it why don't they just fix Windows search? Nothing more infuriating than typing in the name of a system utility verbatim and getting unrelated results.
I remember when my users knew where their data was at, and could find it. Users understood folders and naming, and would generally be able to locate things most of the time.
Now, Windows Explorer is such a mess of shit they don't care about like "3D Objects" and "One Drive" above any attached drive letters. The Save As dialog in the latest versions of office makes it truly obtuse to save a file in a folder you know the location of. Bottom line is that Microsoft has increasingly made the UI more obtuse, resulting in people needing to use Search to find crap they would otherwise have been able to locate quickly. Coupled with Search being - as you note - stupid, it's just a horrible experience.
Bonus gripe: why do OS and installed programs take any time to "find" on the Start Menu? Can't there be a cache of things like Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Word and Pervosoft DeepFake Coworker Porn Fantasy Creator Pro - VR Edition so they just show up instantly? The number of times I've used the Start Menu on a customer machine to launch "cmd" or "command" and it told me "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" is moronic. Winkey-R, type what I want, Enter should be necessary to work around the OS.
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Agreed. I hate the way "Save as" (which also has been renamed, at least once...) makes it hard to specify a folder. I hate this, and all the other symptoms of obscuring the actual file structure, which, as you say, people have understood and used for years.
Still, it's not only Microsoft who do this. You get the same problems in Android, iPhones, DropBox. You know exactly where you want to store something, and have to go through hoops to find it.
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Microsoft completely broke search in the Search 4.0 update for XP. Since forever, most of the searches I do on a Win7 system have to have an asterisk in front of the term or search won't find a damn thing.
Having been completely broken for so long, I'd suggest not holding your breath for a fix.
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While we're at it why don't they just fix Windows search? Nothing more infuriating than typing in the name of a system utility verbatim and getting unrelated results.
And when they fix it, please don't break it in the next update. I've just given up with Windows 10. The most basic things (eg. searching for a file by name, or right-clicking on a taskbar icon for ways to start it), work for a while, then are broken in the next update. In the first couple of years some updates would break all of the file associations, which was outrageous. At least that doesn't happen any more.
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This.
I get that they *THINK* they know what I want. But I really don't want Cortana shitting up the background while I've got a three day render happening or I'm in the middle of recording something important. This nannying about for power users is just brutally stupid.
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We also need a lowlevel function in the GUI libraries where we can just meta-select a UI element and select "Get Rid of This," for things like the gif/emoji buttons on phone keyboards, useless Clippy style bloat in apps, etc.
Re:more impressive would be (Score:5, Insightful)
I still don't understand why they include web searching in the start bar, I can't even find apps that are installed on the computer anymore because of the web search. I installed a program on the computer, then searched for it and windows search can't even come up with the name of the program I have just installed.
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I still don't understand why they include web searching in the start bar
Because every one of those searches counts as a "Bing search" and improves their value to advertisers.
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What I meant was from a customer UI perspective, windows sucks
find command (Score:2)
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Command line is awesome, but if you don't use one for a year, you will not remember it. A GUI is just intuitive and discoverable.
Re:find command (Score:5, Interesting)
Meh, if you don't use a GUI for a year you will forget how to use it because most modern GUIs are highly unintuitive and obtuse. Windows 10 and modern Office styles for example. Is that sentence just a label, or can you click on it? And if you do click on it, do you know what will happen? Bleh. Toss me in front of DCL from VMS which I have not used in 30 years, and I can probably get around in it.
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Much too slow. Everything.exe.
Immediately lists every file on your computer when opened, and filters the list as fast as you type to include only those that include the words/character sequences you've specified.
Once you've used instant find-as-you-type, there's no going back.
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I understand it was the inspiration behind fsearch on Linux
Just get "Everything" (Score:5, Informative)
Other than the unfortunate name, Everything is an awesome replacement for the crappy search tool built into Windows. It is free, works great, and not resource intensive.
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One of the main problems with windows search is that in these cases its NEVER clear that a search of filenames is even taking place, but it is immediately clear that searches other than by filename ARE taking place, and there is no fucking button or tab or anything anywhere that says "this searches filenames" or even *gasp* "this searches drive c:" and of cour
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Even if you search content of files, Microsoft favors it's own file types over other vendors', as the steps to "register" non-MS file types for search is round-about (at least when I last did it).
One wouldn't even need to register many types if there were a search option to search for text strings within for all non-registered types. This happens to work "good enough" for a good many file types.
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One of the main problems with windows search is that in these cases its NEVER clear that a search of filenames is even taking place, but it is immediately clear that searches other than by filename ARE taking place, and there is no fucking button or tab or anything anywhere that says "this searches filenames" or even *gasp* "this searches drive c:" and of course because of that there also isnt a fucking button or tab that says "search only filenames" so on top of it fucking all, even if we prodded windows search into finally searching filenames (because it surely wont at first), it is STILL wasting time searching shit we dont want or need searched, slowing the whole frustrating process down EVEN MORE..
Right click Drive C -> Properties. Disable "Allow file contents to be indexed..."
(and wait half an hour while it sets an attribute on every single file on the entire disk instead of just disabling something in the indexing process)
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Well, if I am not in a browser and was searching using a Windows supplied tool, the last thing I would logically expect would be to get a web search. And yet, that is what happens. Cortana assumes you are just another web user.
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One of the first things I install on any Windows box. Can't recommend it enough.
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Absolutely agree. Once you've gotten used to instant find-as-you-search you can never go back.
For years I installed WINE on my Linux boxes primarily to be able to use Everything, despite some inconveniences.
Now there's fsearch on Linux, which is basically an open source version of the same thing.
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oops: find-as-you-type
No, it won't (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no "understanding" of what I'm looking for. Whatever word (or words) I put in a search is what I'm looking for. Not synonyms, not partial matches, the exact words.
This will be as bad as the continual harassment when I turn off suggestions in a browser. I still get the damn dropdown showing what I'm typing even though I told it not to do anything.
At least with Cortana it can be disabled so it doesn't interfere with getting work done.
Other solutions (Score:2)
return us old find (Score:3)
When I switched from WinXP to Win10, I desperately missed the file search. I'm unable to find ANY file on my pc: nor by file-name, nor content, nor date or size. The search-function is absolute bullshit: it takes forever, finds nothing or lists unrelated files. I cannot believe Microsoft broke this basic function so badly! I cannot believe I have to use third-party solutions for such simple tasks.
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Their lives depends on sending your search term off to bing.com as you type. You ought to know that by now.
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This will change your life https://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]
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Truly.
It makes it considerably faster to search for a file than navigate to the folder where you know it is. I highly recommend using long, descriptive file names with lots of keywords to make it even better. Then you don't need to remember a files name or location to access it, just what it was about.
Forget "database based file systems" - I dream of the day such search is integrated into file browsers and standard open/save dialogs.
don't care, have it turned off (Score:2)
I don't care of Cortana automatically finds my dream job and the love of my life, it produces so much crap, and is so intrusive, that there's nothing good that it does that warrants its existence.
For decades now, one of the first things that power users do with windows is to disable Windows Search. Cortana is just the most recent incarnation of that.
The same for whatever the tool is called on OSX. The last straw was when I was trying to work and the laptop started doing weird stuff. I had a comedy routin
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Apple Meatball F brings up a search with a finder window. You can search by name, contents, dates, folder, etc. You can add combinations too. No one I know uses the Search window, and find just splatters a Terminal window with whatever crap it found.
Much better alternatives (Score:2)
Windows search is the worst (Score:2)
The syntax doesn't work, and it takes too long. To get around it when I need to do some serious searching I use notepad++. It searches the entire file and finds information faster than windows searching through file names only.
Keep in mind that windows search is indexed, which means it should be faster because it's looking through a list. But opening the files, searching through the whole file and then moving to the next one is faster. I don't understand how you could build such a crappy search, a 5 year ol
Find files "faster"? How about FIND files! (Score:3)
Windows search can't find files at all! I've had cases where I type a part of the actual file name of a document in the Documents folder, and Windows can't find it. I have no idea why it's so hard for Microsoft to get search right, but they have managed to mess it up for years now. I don't care about Cortana, I just want to find files!