Whenever Microsoft starts messing with something like the search function in Windows, a lot of people are going to be holding their breath and expecting the worst. Well, get ready, because they’re redesigning the whole thing.
In July, we shared how we are improving the Windows Search Box with less clutter and more control. We introduced a calmer home screen, removed promotional content from web results, and gave you more choice over whether web and Microsoft Store suggestions appear.
Today, we’re carrying those investments forward with a new Windows Search experience built on WinUI 3. This modern foundation makes Windows Search faster and more efficient with resources, while delivering an even more streamlined and focused design.
↫ Anshul Rawat at the Windows Blogs
The company claims this new version of search is faster and uses less memory, which, if true, are very welcome improvements. It’s also just a single column of results now, and they’re adding inline previews for things like weather and files on your machine, as well as for answers to all kinds of queries you might normally go to an online search engine for. You can now also use search to perform all kinds of tasks in Windows, like turning on dark mode, managing windows, and so on.
All of this can be done using relatively natural language, and Microsoft claims they’ve implemented better detection of typing errors and synonyms, which is quite welcome. Weirdly enough, though, it’s not yet integrated into the Start menu, since it’s a preview just for testers, but that’s something they’re working on for future releases.
Judging by the videos and screenshots, I’m actually kind of positively surprised. This looks quite decent and nice, and if the promised performance improvements actually materialise, this may actually be an upgrade to search worth looking forward to. Of course, this is still Microsoft, so it’s just as likely they’ll screw up somewhere between now and when this goes live to regular users.
Still, I think it looks decent.
Tell me if I’m wrong, please, but a lot of this seems AI based. The result on the Eiffel Tower, Turning dark mode on… Isn’t this AI powered stuff? I didn’t see AI mentioned in the article (I did a search).
Honest question: is (local) search really such a big thing? I have 1000nds of documents from over 20 years of work, million lines of source code. But except a grep for filenames I literally never search anything. If something is not in the folder where it should be, then it simply does not exist. Index jobs are usually the first thing I deactivate, since it eats lots of resources achieving nothing (for me).
What are people searching for on their own computers? (At large, so it justifies that much effort into all this UI and indexing work?) I just don’t understand the use-case.