There are search facilities in Windows to help you find files, but I have never found them that good. They seem slow and inefficient, but there are great alternatives like Wise JetSearch.
Search from the taskbar
Windows 10 has a search box on the taskbar next to the Start button. Click it and there are buttons to search for apps, documents or the web. Click Documents to search for files.
The results are displayed in the search panel and are organised into categories like Documents – This PC and Documents – OneDrive.
The problem is that this tool does not search everywhere. It just looks in the obvious places like the Documents folder, the Start menu and maybe a few other places. If there are files outside of these places, they will not be found.
Search with Explorer
In the top right corner of every Explorer window is a search box. It searches from the current location, so to search the whole disk, first select it in the sidebar. Then type in the search term.
This search is OK, but it is very slow and the green bar crawls along the top of the window at a snail’s pace. In fact, it was still going a couple of minutes after starting this search and I had to stop it.
It is far too slow to be useful, although it did find a lot of files.
Search with Wise JetSearch
Wise JetSearch is a free utility that provides fast and simple file searching. It only searches names and it does not look in the contents of files, but while Explorer takes a couple of minutes to finish a search of the C: drive, Wise JetSearch has the results in around a second.
In the top left corner is a list of drives and you can choose any. You could even search all drives simultaneously.
The search box accepts wildcards like ? So you could search for ‘news?.doc’ and it would find news1.doc, newsZ.doc and so on. A ? Means any character.
One slight irritation is that is searches for the search term anywhere in the filename – at the start, end, half way through and so on. It cannot search for files starting with ‘news’ for example, and it finds files with ‘news’ anywhere in the name.
The search results appear very quickly and it shows the filename, path, size, date modified and type. Clicking any of these column headers instantly sorts the results, so you can quickly find the most recent file, the biggest and so on.
Double clicking a search result opens it in whatever app is associated with the file type. Click a URL and a web browser opens, click a JPEG and a photo viewer or editor opens.
Right clicking a file in the search results displays a menu. There are file management options like copy, move and delete, options to open the file or the folder that contains it, and several more items.
Close the JetSearch window and a little widget stays on the screen in the top right. Move the mouse over it and it slides onto the screen and shows a mini search box. This is useful if you are performing a lot of searches and it means the full window does not need to be kept on the screen.
This is a useful utility that in many ways is better than the built in search features in Windows. Keep a copy on the disk for those occasions when you cannot remember where you put a file.
Program: Wise JetSearch
Price: Free
By: WiseCleaner
Windows: XP, 7, 10 - 32/64-bit
Size: 1.77 MB download
Verdict: A fast file search utility that is preferable to Windows search
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