Morning all. I’ve seen enough IT chat on here to reckon on getting some good recommendations, so here goes…

What’s the desktop PC search tool of choice? I have W10, and for the last year or so have been fed up of how often the search index needs rebuilding, can’t find an Outlook message I sent only last week, a document that I opened 3 days ago, and so on.

I currently have UltraSearch as a secondary tool, to quickly find things by name, but ideally I’m looking for something that can reliably search within documents, and that would include Outlook if possible.

Soo… what’s recommended?

Can’t help on the 3rd party search tool side as I’ve never used one but I’d rebuild the PC if you can and see if Windows Search sorts itself out. I’m assuming you don’t have billions of tiny files? The only time I’ve seen a major issue with Windows Search indexing was on a 16TB file server.

There seems to have been a problem with outlook indexing for the last couple of months :(. Hope it gets sorted as it’s painful. Got that problem Ina few machines now.

I’d rebuild the PC if you can and see if Windows Search sorts itself out. I’m assuming you don’t have billions of tiny files?

Pretty sure I don’t – it’s just a regular home/ office PC really. Whenever Windows Search spits the dummy, I generally go and rebuild the index, and that’ll see it right for another week or two. Then it starts acting up again and it’s time to rebuild it again 🙁

I don’t think I’ve had to rebuild the search index since XP days. There’s something odd there.

I think I’d be running checkdisk / sfc / disk cleanup in the first instance.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound right.

Probably have a look in to the back ground file system to see if it’s okay.

Also consider a scheduled task on a regular basis to automate rebuilding the index.

Info:

Outlook search is currently well b0rked for many people.

W10 search is generally very fragile, mines never worked since I messed with the default settings.

Cortana was the cause of a few search issues I came across. Try killing her:
https://ctrl.blog/entry/how-to-disable-cortana

I quite like “everything”
Dunno if it’s actually better than any other but pretty quick and seems comprehensive
(IANAcomputeryperson)