With Recall, Microsoft is Using AI To Fix Windows' Eternally Broken Search 104
Microsoft today unveiled Recall, a new AI-powered feature for Windows 11 PCs, at its Build 2024 conference. Recall aims to improve local searches by making them as efficient as web searches, allowing users to quickly retrieve anything they've seen on their PC. Using voice commands and contextual clues, Recall can find specific emails, documents, chat threads, and even PowerPoint slides.
The feature uses semantic associations to make connections, as demonstrated by Microsoft Product Manager Caroline Hernandez, who searched for a blue dress and refined the query with specific details. Microsoft said that Recall's processing is done locally, ensuring data privacy and security. The feature utilizes over 40 local multi-modal small language models to recognize text, images, and video.
The feature uses semantic associations to make connections, as demonstrated by Microsoft Product Manager Caroline Hernandez, who searched for a blue dress and refined the query with specific details. Microsoft said that Recall's processing is done locally, ensuring data privacy and security. The feature utilizes over 40 local multi-modal small language models to recognize text, images, and video.
no thank you. (Score:1)
i opt-out.
Usual MS question (Score:3)
Can I turn it off and if, how?
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MS answer: Yes, you can turn it off. It will get turned on again after every update were we can manage that. And attackers will still be able to use the vulnerabilities it has and it can still cause other problems with your installation as well.
But all I want is text search (Score:3, Insightful)
Just plain-text, optionally case-sensitive, literal search that doesn't cue on "test" when my search string is "tests" (looking at you, Discord). How can that possibly be so hard for a computer to do?
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Extremely hard, apparently. To this day I rely on Notepad++ to search for words in log files rather than Windows' own search function in the log directory.
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There are various grep implementations for Windows that you might find useful.
Re:But all I want is text search (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed! Substring search with rudimentary Boolean would be good enough for me the vast majority of the time. The UI could be like this:
Find documents with words that
[Contain|v] [_____________]
[And|v] [Contain|v] [_____________]
[And|v] [Contain|v] [_____________]
[And|v] [Contain|v] [_____________]
[_] Case Sensitive [_] Search file name only
"|v" represents a drop-down list. The left-most drop-down would be And, Or, & Not, and the middle would be Contain, Start-With, End-With, & Equal. The Or's would be grouped together. For example:
Words that [Equal] AA
[Or] [Equal] BB
[Or] [Equal] CC
[And] [Equal] DD
Would be "show all documents having the word DD and at least one word of AA, BB, or DD."
I've coded UI's like this multiple times, and they rarely confuse users (after experimenting a little).
If MS merely perfects bicycle search science, we don't need rocket science. Industry is too eager to shove in buzzwords rather than improve what mostly works, making bloated buggy messes. The most annoying excuse is "but it's not enterprise/web-scale". Most projects are not giant. Why bloat up the 98% for the 2% biggies? The web-scale thing is probably not AI-related, but you get the idea. Like AI, web-scale trigger's me-too-ism. I'm putting your whippersnappers on a buzzword diet until you git off my lawn!
(This is Monday, so there's probably a Major Typo. Yes, that is partly a military joke.)
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Your average desktop user is going to see that and their eyes will glaze over.
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Have a simple one as the default, and an "Advanced" button to show the rest.
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Looks good to me but you're not using the countless billions the company spent on AI so your project will never get funded.
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Just claim the search form itself was designed by AI. The morons pushing it are not going to check, they already know they overpromised.
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Windows used to offer discrete search terms like this until the Search 4.0 update for WinXP. That update is what totally destroyed the usefulness of search and it's been completely broken ever since. Never mind all the new AI stuff... Windows search has been largely broken for the better part of 20 years.
It still blows my mind how such a simple feature has been screwed for a couple decades, and hardly anyone even talks about it. For many many years, I've been using FileLocater Lite as a substitute, and i
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Have you tried using Advanced Query Syntax [microsoft.com] in Windows Explorer's search field?
Should be something like
(And make sure to check "Search > Advanced options > File contents" for the content search to work...)
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I just want windows+f to bring up a nice search dialogue again rather than feedback.
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I've never understood why microsoft found it so hard to get this shit working. On macs it worked pretty damn good from day one, 25 years ago, to the point where people just recomended using search to start programs instead of doing what I usually do and drag the applications folder to the task bar to make a faux start button, and I probably will eventually stop doing since search is so good these days.
Oh its not perfect, but its good-enough and more or less instance except for the first 30 seconds after boo
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There is only one answer: MS is both _incabable_ and _uninterested_ in making it work. Just one of the two things is not enough to explain this crap.
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I've never understood why microsoft found it so hard to get this shit working. On macs it worked pretty damn good from day one, 25 years ago,
No it didn't. It was super crap from the start.
You type something, it builds a list, mostly filled with things you don't want. Then after tens of seconds you see the thing you do want in the list so you want to click on it, but it's not there because the fucking mac is still compiling a huge huge list of potential results you may or may not be interested in and the item you wanted was shoved out of the window with a screen update (preferably as low as possible so you have to scroll maximally far), making yo
Uh, wrong direction (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with Windows Search is that it tries to second guess what I want. Using AI to make it guess harder is not going to solve the problem.
Re:Uh, wrong direction (Score:4, Funny)
Well, it did improve. Originally, I am very sure the search routine consisted of a single line:
"I saw you search for $whatever, did you mean 'how can I tell if my copy of Windows is genuine?'?"
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As long as it's an aggressively popping up animated paper clip I'm down with that.
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Now I think that at some point in time the little bastards are going to put something in a end user license agreement saying they can scan your da
Re: Uh, wrong direction (Score:2)
Of course the processing occurs on your computer. They want to use your electricity to help them mine your data.
It is the same reason javascript is executed by your browser, not the server. It has nothing to do with privacy, and pointing to it as a privacy feature is a smokescreen.
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It is Microsoft. You expected an actual improvement? Get real.
Great: it doesn't work, so add AI (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with Microsoft search isn't a lack of AI. The problem is it doesn't work. It does not effectively search your hard disk, instead trying to pull in stupid web results that are irrelevant.
Everything (voidtools.com) fixes what's broken in Windows search and is fast, lightweight, and simple. And doesn't need "AI"
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the start menu problem is intentional. they intentionally broke it to make it work less well. I Remember in windows 8 days it even worked properly, however when exploits like rubber ducky were a big deal, where you could plug in any malicious hid device and have it run programs, they crippled it so that it ran slower and swapped results around randomly.
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Don't blame the dev. They're just following the specs that came from any of: UI/UX, product, program, exec, marketing teams.
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No one else seems to need AI to design a search routine, there were perfectly:
$ search [...]*.jov "phi'e"
That seemed to work OK 40+ years ago - and a few minutes ago. How hard could it be to put that in a GUI?
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I've been using TreeSize's Advanced File Search for this, and you can basically put together any combination of operations you want.
You could also just use Windows Explorer's Advanced Query Syntax and search for
(substitude "foldername:" for "path:" if you want x to be anywhere below that folder)
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That feature for me makes Everything pretty much perfect now. M$ have a lot to learn as their own search is total bloatware in comparison.
I will take the 2 week package! (Score:2)
I will take the 2 week package!
I'm Not Talking To My PC. (Score:3, Insightful)
I type in a word and you find it. Period. Don't even 'remember' that I did it. Just do it and shut the fuck up.
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That's funny, I have the icon in the lower right of my laptop screen saying it is installed and ready to use and I have an older Acer with an Intel 6 core processor and an Nvidia 1060 video card.
Just sayin'.
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I do now. I found my Sharpie!
The replacement I install on every windows box (Score:3)
https://www.voidtools.com/supp... [voidtools.com]
Does an index of the filesystem and brings results back as fast as you type.
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And that's been the preferred tool since what XP?
It's baffling that they've never been able to match the performance.
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Microsoft seems to perennially try to complicate search with the idea that people want to search the contents
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Looks efficient but can I bind it to the start key?
Maybe I can rig it a quick path from the Run prompt, which is probably where Future Me was going to start kludging things since there they can be genuinely fucking instant, the way simple OS operations ought to be after 30 years of surplus power.
Yes, yes, you run Arch.
Oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
"Our search is so broken that the only way to fix it is for you to opt in to sending all your personal data to our AI cloud so we can train off it. And in return you'll get a feature that was working fine 20 years ago on computers 1/10,000th as powerful."
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"And search will still suck but thanks for the data".
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"And search will still suck but thanks for the data".
a) Recall works locally. No data is sent to the cloud.
b) Microsoft already has countless services that do send data to the cloud, do index your data, do categorise and analyse it, along with the ability to push code changes to your system at their whim. So if you're upset about this specific service (even with your incorrect view) it shows you fundamentally don't know how your system works as it is.
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A) that's what Microsoft says.
B) I fundamentally am aware of all the Microsoft call home data raping. I haven't used a MS system in several years. My wife uses her work laptop strictly for work on the company vpn. Her company can block that shit if they want to but it's not her data.
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You've seen the telemetry analysis of Windows 11, right? Hell, it requires you to make an online account just to login locally
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That's a great way of saying "I have no idea how this product works but feel the need to write something about it anyway".
Nothing is sent to the cloud. Recall works 100% locally and offline.
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"B-but you have no idea how the feature actually works!"
Buddy, I know how Microsoft works
Great (Score:2)
Now all they have to do is train their neural network on a 486 computer running windows 95, and try to get the search as close as possible of that machine
Microsoft Just Wants to Look at Your Junk : ) (Score:4, Insightful)
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A small price to pay for the privilege of using an operating system: a complete loss of privacy.
Typical ignorant view... for two reasons. 1) Recall works completely locally and nothing is sent to the cloud., 2) If you don't trust Microsoft then you already have no privacy. You ceded that to them when you ran Windows, the OS which has countless services that already go through your data, upload it to onedrive, index it, categorise it, and ... I hope I don't need to remind you ... is all from a company who can push code updates to your device on a whim.
You either trust Microsoft in which case this isn't
Microsoft's biggest search problem (Score:4, Insightful)
is continuing to search in the background returning results as it finds them. It's horrendous. You type something into the start menu, see the thing you want highlighted, and just as you click "enter" the search result updates putting something you didn't want at the top highlighted result, usually an internet search result that open Edge (even though no one has that as their default browser), an resulting in you having to buy yet another monitor after you put your fist through you current one.
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Your first mistake is not turning indexing off.
Your first mistake is thinking settings are retained.
Your second mistake thinking this is an indexing issue, it's not. There is another setting though for turning this off, but ultimately the problem is the same, a result displayed does not mean a search is completed, and (outside of file explorer) there's no visible indication a search is still ongoing from other sources.
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I think I've had exactly this trouble in the past, but for some reason, for me (on Windows 11) it's instant now, probably because I have indexing turned off, so just get crappy web results and windows settings.
Meanwhile on my Linux box... (Score:4, Insightful)
I just give the files I create sensible names. Then "plocate" can find them anywhere in the system in under 10 milliseconds.
No 5 minutes of "Working on it..." with an asymptotically slowing progress bar. No dozens of AI threads in the background constantly swapping out all my memory pages and flushing my IO buffers. No dribbling sensitive information all over the disks and into the cloud.
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I got lazy to do that in the days of horrendous Nepomuk, and learned to search by content. KDE's Baloo works quite well for that, and instantaneously. The thing is, I never know beforehand in what context I'll remember said document or email, so filenames aren't enough. I also somehow learned to use tagging alongside folders.
Once upon a time it could also index IM chats, but that closed up in a very strong manner in the past 10 years.
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Re: Meanwhile on my Linux box... (Score:2)
Just give up on desktop search, MS (Score:3)
For the sake of argument, let's assume there are some things Windows does well. Search is not, and never has been, one of them. I think after 30+ years it's time give up. There are tools like Agent Ransack that do search on Windows right. You can search by file name and/or contents. Search by date, file size, extension. Search with regex, wild cards, or literal strings. No fudging results like it's being paid on commission--searching for "tests" does not return results for "test"--and no fancy guessing on what you meant--search for "mime" does not return results for "meme".
That other groups have accomplished this with much less resources than Microsoft has, might just mean MS doesn't have what it takes for this particular task.
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For the sake of argument, let's assume there are some things Windows does well. Search is not, and never has been, one of them. I think after 30+ years it's time give up. There are tools like Agent Ransack that do search on Windows right. You can search by file name and/or contents. Search by date, file size, extension. Search with regex, wild cards, or literal strings. No fudging results like it's being paid on commission--searching for "tests" does not return results for "test"--and no fancy guessing on what you meant--search for "mime" does not return results for "meme".
That other groups have accomplished this with much less resources than Microsoft has, might just mean MS doesn't have what it takes for this particular task.
This whole thing stinks of Microsoft not trying to improve search, but serving you ads in search results.
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Ironically, pre-2022, Microsoft was highly interested in bashing Google and insisting it wasn't in the business of selling ads.
Obviously someone sees a problem in maintaining the inflated Teams-related profit numbers from those years.
Requires a Copilot+ PC (Score:4, Interesting)
The MS goal is to train its AI on YOUR DATA (Score:3)
Microsoft doesn't have access to the enormous training repositories of Facebook and Google. The next best thing is the user data on Windows PCs.
Their problem now is how to get permission to use it. Claiming a core component of their OS sucks seems an odd way to go about it.
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Claiming a core component of their OS sucks seems an odd way to go about it.
I agree, but odd or not, they won't care if it turns out to work.
Who comes up with names? (Score:4)
Figures, they always have bugs. But how do you recall software?
Just throw it in a box and tape it up. Send it to Redmond, I guess.
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I assumed it was going to be some form of backup application.
But I see it is just for them to easily get to your personal shit.
The first appropriate naming of MS software (Score:2)
Just use Everything (Score:2)
Literally, the search engine you wish windows had:
https://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]
All I see is failures... (Score:2)
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The current version of Windows is a failure, office 365 is junk, Bing is garbage, Xbox is laughable, Cortana is useless compared to competitors... Is there anything Microsoft is actually doing good these days???
They have been doing very good at making hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue.
But once we disregard reliably generating obscene amounts of wealth for their management and shareholders for almost 40 years, yeah, pretty awful at doing stuff and things.
Re: All I see is failures... (Score:2)
Windows search is the worst. (Score:2)
Windows 10 search really is the worst. It doesn't find programs that are installed, and when it does it won't show it you in a consistent way. It's insane to me that you can install a program, see it in the start menu, and the search doesn't know it's there. I've literally installed a program and had it show up in a search less than 3 seconds after installing it in KDE on Linux.
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Windows 10 search really is the worst. It doesn't find programs that are installed, and when it does it won't show it you in a consistent way. It's insane to me that you can install a program, see it in the start menu, and the search doesn't know it's there.
What's depressing to me is that, not only has this problem been solved with Classic Shell and Open Shell and even Aston Menu...they had this issue solved in *WINDOWS VISTA*.
The fundamental problem is that Microsoft wants to treat Start Menu searches like Bing Searches by default, rather than either giving users the ability to disable this function ("I'll open Edge if I want to search Bing!") or limit Bing searches to times when local search fails to return any results. So, *everything* is a Bing search, wh
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Yep exactly, the last version of Windows I used was 7 and it worked fine there. It's so stereotypical Microsoft to forget how to do one of the few things they got right.
Will Recall be reporting to the mothership? (Score:2)
Google Desktop Search did this years ago (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
It was great, you could actually find stuff, from emails to contents of files, anywhere on your hard drive, instantly. No AI required.
But of course, Google killed it.
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Not exactly. Google killed the Desktop Search client, but for Google itself the scanning and reporting of all of your files just moved into Chrome. Chrome does the dirty work and Google doesn't have to convince you to install anything else. Plus one less product to ship.
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Where in Chrome does it allow you to search the contents of your local files?
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Just what exactly is the Software Reporter tool and what does it do? Maybe Google could tell you.
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The Software Reporter tool has nothing to do with what Google Desktop Search did. It does *not* help you find your documents on your hard drive.
So this Software Reporter tool looks for potentially harmful software on your computer. How does that relate to this topic?
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It helps Google know your shit, not you. The scanning your hard drive function moved into Chrome, the part where you get to see the results did not.
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I know, that's what you said at the start. But what does that have to do with Google Desktop Search, or Microsoft Recall, which both help YOU find things on your hard drive?
Yes, I know, you don't like the intrusiveness. That's a given, all those products are intrusive. But what does it have to do with this announcement? Nothing has changed, with regard to intrusiveness.
Still gotta index your content (Score:2)
This is where Microsoft search fails so miserably, their indexer is crap! You can type a precise filename, and sometimes it won't find it. Why would AI be more able to find it?
VoidTools - Search Everything (Score:1)
I don't know why MS just doesn't buy these guys up.
It works. Perfectly. Fast. Lightweight.
The solution (Score:2)
I'm sure this will go brilliantly. (Score:1)
It's like a building contractor whose garden sheds are terrible, saying "That's fine, we'll just start building skyscrapers instead, it'll be great."
Privacy from a large company? (Score:2)
There is nothing that guarantees privacy will be violated more than a company like Microsoft promising they won't violate privacy.