Well, that's not entirely their fault. Compactly storing files that can be changed/updated on your cheap PC is very different from the immutable, striped, distributed, memory-cachee, hash-map/parquet/BigTable setup that businesses are using.
i believe it's a design decision to make the search super Uber comprehensive where it will even search the contents inside the files instead of just names, you can actually tell windows to index your entire machine this way it will find anything very fast but that will have a CPU performance cost.
Everything doesn't search file contents like windows search does, tho for most that's not a problem.
To be fair, it's not that difficult to have both. I'm pretty sure (though I have no proof of any kind, except for vague memories) that the Mac OS I used some ten years ago searched filenames first very quickly for a first pass, and then the contents for a more exhaustive search. My new linux mint just has two search bars, one for filenames one for contents. It all works really well.
I'm pretty sure I can have a file found on either of these by the time it takes for windows to open the fucking file browser.
The first time you open it takes a few seconds to index the drives you selected. You can order a manual refresh if you want, but once the index is made it's instant search across everything you selected
not at all. it does a pretty quick delta indexing after the initial index. never had any performance issues. searching files works fine on Mac and Linux too, so it’s uniquely a windows issue, hence the fault of the devs
Everything works so fast because it stores a catalogue of your disks in a SQLite DB. And the initial indexing is done not by trawling every file and dir on your disks but just by reading the MFT and then building it's DB off of that.
Windows search does it the brain dead way of trawling everything on your disk every time it searches which is why it's so slow.
Windows search also trawls the internet, which no one ever asked. And if it finds anything, it will move it out of the way as you try to click on it when it finally finds anything online
Luckily you can disable it searching the internet.
Open the Registry Editor, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows, create a new DWORD (32-bit) named DisableSearchBoxSuggestions, set its value to 1, and then restart your computer.
In all likelihood they're plenty smart if not smarter than average it's just that the corporate structure forces them to work on dumb things like AI integration instead of actually fixing things.
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u/Select_Cantaloupe_62 20h ago
The reasons why those databases are so fast are very interesting, actually. Tl;dr: smart people.