Windows Search is basically a desktop search application much like Google’s Desktop Search. It builds an index of the files – and other information like emails – on the system after installation which takes some time depending on the size of the hard disks and the amount of files stored on them. Some users reported indexing times of several hours in previous versions of Windows Search.

It does take this long because Windows Search does not only index file names and attributes but also file contents for selected files including most text formats like Word and HTML documents but also media files like images and video formats.

I still prefer Locate32 which is resource friendly and faster in my opinion.

The two parameters that you always have to select are a path and a search term that you want to find, every other parameter is optional. Search results begin to appear immediately while other files are still processed. The time it takes to process all files depends on the size of the hard drive(s), the cpu, ram, files on disk and several other factors. It is still fast enough and responsive so that it is possible to work with the search results even if the search is still going on.

Search queries are not only compared to filenames but also with file contents. This is extremely useful if you are looking for documents that contain a specific phrase. The line containing the phrase is shown in the search results together with the filename and path of the file.

Fileseek offers a few functions that allow users to refine their searches. Files and Filetypes can be included or excluded in the search. This feature supports wildcards and multiple entries.

Regular Expressions are supported in the search queries. This is a powerful advanced feature of Fileseek. Best of all though is the size of Fileseek. It’s tiny with only 186 Kilobyte unpacked.

Fileseek uses a different approach than my favorite search utility Locate32. Locate32 uses a database that has to be updated regularly. The benefit of this approach is a blazing fast search, much faster than that of Fileseek. If you do not search that often Fileseek might be the better alternative.