The Advanced tab offers other search filters like casing, extensions and files or folders only, the “File containing text” option will search the contents of files for the search string although this will significantly increase search times. Locate32 supports searching with wildcards and regular expressions with additional tabs to filter results by date, time and file size. While the version on the official website is from 2011, there is a repository at Sourceforge and a newer version from 2014 with a few updates and fixes is available.Īlthough creating a database is done manually, there are quite a few options for setting one up, including the ability to have multiple databases and perform searches from specific databases. Windows Search isn’t the only indexing search tool available, and there are many others that can index your files quickly by reading the Master File Table on the drive, here are 7 for you to try out.Ī lot of people have recommended Locate32 to us over the years as a good quality and fast file searcher that uses an index database to get faster results. While Windows Search might not be the best, if you have hundreds of thousand or even millions of files stored on your system, indexing is still the way to go for the fastest results. Windows Search is often criticized because it can be resource intensive and make thousands of writes to your hard drive or SSD in the background. Before you can make use of indexing in Windows the system first has to create the database.

When you search for something the database is queried instead of Windows manually going through the whole system to see if a file match exists.

Search indexing is a simple concept and it collects the names and locations of all the files you have on the computer, and places them all into a database. Windows has had the simple ability to search for a file for the longest time, and in Windows Vista an even faster way was introduced to search your files with the indexing feature which brings up the search results almost instantly. Being able to search through the files you have on your computer is an integral part of file management and typing a search term into a box and letting the computer do it will save far more time than manually searching through drives and folders yourself.

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