The portable freeware Dropout for the Windows operating system is a search tool that has been designed for exactly this purpose. All you basically need to do is to place the program executable in a directory, for instance the root of the USB drive or your Dropbox folder, to have a sophisticated search application at hand when it is needed.

Dropout displays a search form right on the startup screen. You can use it to find files in the particular directory structure or switch to the more advanced search under the advanced tab.

Dropout indexes all files that are stored in its root directory structure and saves the search information in a folder that it creates in root. The program indexes the contents of some text based file types like txt, pdf or doc so that content matching results are displayed as well in the results list.

The searching itself usually takes less than a second after the initial indexing. The search supports the query parser syntax of Apache Lucene which includes boolean operators, wildcards and grouping options. Search examples provided by the developer on the program homepage include:

• Tests NOT NUnit – Finds all instances of the work Tests but NOT with NUnit
• Scripts AND Tests – Requires the words Scripts AND Tests
• Dev* – Words starting with dev, i.e. Development, Develop, Devious, etc
• type:doc AND Tests: Searches for the word Tests only in *.doc files
• modified:201109* – All files created from September 2011
• modified:[201105 TO 201106]: Files modified between May and June 2011

Results can be sorted by all values including name, modification date or containing folder. The search tool furthermore assigns a score to each hit and makes those scores sortable as well.

A double-click on a file opens it in the default viewer for its file type. A right-click displays a context menu with an option to open the containing folder in Windows Explorer.

The advanced search form offers to search contents, file names, types and filter the results by a start and end modification date.

Windows users can download Dropout from the project homepage over at Codeplex. The program requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0. It is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Alternative search tools are Everything or Locate.

By using certain operators and searching syntax, AQS allows for a significant level of precision with search results. As long as you learn the operators, you will be able to find specific results rapidly. This syntax is a gateway to specified search parameters. This saves time and overall effort. When a file needs to be found, the basic Windows Search option will work, but generally you are presented with a list of possibly related files. You would have to sort through the search results list to find the right file. AQS hones this down and gives you the control to quickly find specific files and applications. The syntax is easy to learn and need only be applied to awaken the AQS potential within Windows 7.

As in the screenshot above, open a Windows Explorer window and search for a term. “Microsoft” was selected in this search and it was narrowed down to the Documents folder as the selected area for the search. The following screen shot is a search for “Reader” on the main hard drive (C :).

This comes up with many different files. This user is looking for Screen captures, so eliminating the term “Adobe” would be favorable in order to find an SC Reader file. Simply add a dash before words you wish to eliminate from the search results.

This yields all files without “Adobe” attached to the filename. The SC file was discovered, as were other important files that may be of use. The point is that the search option changed and the simple syntax entry of (-) before a term negation will alter the search parameters.
Similar to Google, if you want to search for exact phrases, use quotation marks. In this example, the user has documents on social commerce. Social commerce is entered in quotations in the search field.

Apparently the file has multiple copies in a few different locations but it was found quickly nonetheless. Windows Search does not discern between letter cases, so the lettering in the search field is not case sensitive. These are the AQS operators involving text searches:

• NOT/- : Using “not” in addition to a prefix dash tells the search to exclude items in the following term.
• AND/+ : “And” and the prefix of the plus sign aims the search to solely include items matching both search terms.
• Use quotes (“”) to filter for a specified term or phrase

You can take this even further by using search filters. You can search by Kind, Date modified, Type and Size.

Some alternatives to using the mouse include the following syntax:

• search terms >mm/dd/yy
• search terms datemodified:mm/dd/yy..mm/dd/yy
• search terms date:past month

This is just an introduction to Using Windows 7 Advanced Search Operators. There are many options for searching with syntax. Some examples include:

• size:>=4mb < 12mb
• modified:September…yesterday
• type:music bitrate:>=180kbps

This is a phenomenal feature in Windows 7. The ability to use natural language in a GUI advanced search is definitely a wise addition to the geek toolbox.

But changing the display to icons is not the most comfortable option. You have probably heard about the god mode before. You can basically create a folder with a special name to get direct access to all Windows 7 Control Panel tools.

To do that create a new folder on your system and rename it to GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}

Once done you have a single folder that you can click whenever you want to access all control panel applets at once.

But this guide is not about the god mode. I recently stumbled upon an even easier option to display all the control panel items. The core benefit of this method is that it works right from the standard control panel menu. It becomes even more effective if you pin the control panel to the taskbar (if you run Windows 7).

Jochen found out that you can use the run form of the start menu to display a large list of control panel items:

Click on the start orb and enter e into the run form there and wait until the search results show up. Click on Control Panel. This opens a new Windows Explorer window with all control panel items containing the letter e on the same page. That’s more than 200 different items on my 64-bit Windows 7 system.

It does not seem possible to do a wildcard search though to display all items at once.

You can however use the search form in the explorer window to find specific items. Just enter what you are looking for, e.g. firewall, network or desktop. Only the correct items are displayed afterwards.

Here is a trick to combine the best of both worlds. Open the Control Panel and enter a search term. Do you see what is happening? Windows will display all relevant control panel items, even those that are not displayed in the category or icon view by default.

Windows 7 users can pin the Control Panel to the taskbar to open, search and access all control panel tools in record time.

This method is faster if you know what you are looking for. How do you use the Windows Control Panel?

You can give this a try if you want. Enable Windows Search if is it not running already and visit some of your favorite websites. Now run CCleaner or another temporary file cleaner that deletes the history file of Internet Explorer, the web browser cache and the index.dat file.

Re-open Internet Explorer and enter letters of web addresses or titles that you visited previously in the search bar. You should see History suggestions in the suggestions bar, provided that you have not changed the settings in Internet Explorer or indexing options of Windows Search.

There are actually a few options available to block this from happening in the future. Probably the easiest option is right there available in Internet Explorer.

Click on Tools (or the Tools icon in Internet Explorer 9) and select Internet Options from the menu.

Switch to the content tab there and locate the AutoComplete section in the menu.

It reads “AutoComplete stores previous entries on webpages and suggests matches for your”. Click the Settings button next to the description.

Check to see if “Use Windows Search for better results” is enabled. If it is remove the checkmark from the checkbox. This disables the feature so that no history information of Internet Explorer are stored by Windows Search. Click the Delete AutoComplete history button on your way out if you like to remove all existing entries.

Disabling the option is the easiest way to break the connection between Internet Explorer and Windows Search. Users who do not use Windows Search at all can disable the search service instead which disables the feature automatically as a consequence.

Users of Windows Vista Business, Ultimate or Enterprise, and Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate or Enterprise, can enable Internet search in the Group Policy Editor. The editor can be launched by entering gpedit.msc in the Windows Start Menu search form, or by pressing Windows-R, typing gpedit.msc and hitting enter.

internet search start menu

The location Local Computer Policy > User Configuration > Start Menu and Taskbar contains the preference “Add Search Internet link to Start Menu”. A double-click opens the configuration window, where the preference can be enabled. This enables Internet Search in the start menu.

search internet

The Start Menu does not look different than before. The changes become obvious during searches only.

start menu search

A Search the Internet link has been added to the results page which leads to a search in the default web browser.

The option to enable Internet search in the start menu in editions of Windows Vista and Windows 7 that do not offer access to the Group Policy Editor is not available. The only somewhat comparable option is to add the address toolbar to the Windows Taskbar. But that option can only open website urls, and not searches.

Is there another option? Let us know in the comments.

SearchFilterView is a new Nirsoft application that can be used to list the installed iFilter plugins of an operating system. The portable software program will display the installed iFilter plugins automatically after startup.

The program lists the iFilter filename, file desciption, file version, product name, company, path, class IDs and registry time in its interface.

The selection of any iFilter in the list displays the registered file extensions that can be searched thanks to the plugin.

The software offers the standard Nirsoft reporting options. It is possible to create html reports from selected or all iFilters and to save selected items to the local computer system.

Another interesting function is the ability to add or remove extensions from installed iFilters. This can be handy for instance if two iFilters support the same file extension.

SearchFilterView is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system. This includes support for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. The program can be downloaded from the Nirsoft website.

There is however a way to make those file operations more effectively. And that is done by using the Windows Explorer search. The search is powerful enough to speed up some file operations.

This can be largely attributed to the fact that the search will only find files and folders that match the search term if they reside in the folder the search was started or a subfolder of it.

To find all photos with the jpg extension one would simply search for jpg in the search form. Windows will then list all files that match the keyword jpg. This can mean that some files are added to the search results that are not jpg images, for example a file called photojpg.exe would also be included in the list. But that is not a problem as that list can be sorted by file type or name easily.

All or only selected files that have been found this way can be copied or moved easily to another location.

Windows users need to create a new file in the location they want the search shortcut to appear. This can be the Windows desktop or any other location on the computer system. The file needs to be renamed so that it makes use of the .fnd extension, the file name itself does not matter in this case at all. You can for instance create a text document and rename it to search.fnd.

A click on the newly created file (e.g. search.fnd in this case) will directly open the Windows search interface. This is usually faster than having to use the start menu search option in the operating system.

The search option in the Windows XP start menu for instance will still use the basic Windows search functionality instead of that of the newly installed search tool. Enter Reroute XP Search, a lightweight software program that offers the functionality to change the default Windows XP search tool to another tool of the user’s choosing.

All the portable program does is to change the link in the Windows XP start menu so that it points to the third party search software instead of the default Windows XP search tool. It will not change the search functionality of the classic XP start menu.

All it takes to change the link is to run the Reroute XP Search application to browse for another search tool on the computer system. A click on the Apply button will change the link to the selected search tool (it apparently is also possible to select any software, even those that are not search related).

The program comes with a Restore Default button in case the settings need to be reverted again at a later time. Most users who have installed third party search programs are probably using hotkeys instead to open the search interfaces. It can still make sense to change the link in the start menu as well as there are definitely users out there who do not use hotkeys at all. Reroute XP Search is available at the developer’s website. via Technix.

The Windows IFilter Explorer provides an overview of all IFilter plugins that are installed on the Windows operating system. It will display the path and name of the IFilter along with the filetypes that it supports. Various software programs are listed as tabs on the top to switch to the known IFilters of these programs.

It has to be noted that IFilter Explorer has not been updated for about three years which means that some newer applications that make use if IFilters are not in the list. This does not interfere with the data that is displayed in the application window on the other hand. (for example: Windows Search 3.0 is shown in the tabs but not Windows Search 4.0).

The IFilter Explorer can be used to analyze the various IFilter plugins that are installed on the computer system. It can also be used to find filetypes that are not fully indexed by the various applications that support iFilter. The developer of the application is offering several IFilters for download on the website. It does seem that the application is not developed actively anymore.

TheSearchMan definitely falls in the second category with its tiny size of 19 Kilobytes. The portable desktop search software program can be executed from any location of the Windows operating system. It provides a very basic search interface that allows users to select a folder and search term. The program will then display the search results in its interface with the possibility to open the containing folder or files directly from the search results.

One of the most important features of TheSearchMan is the ability to perform a second search that only searches within the search results to refine the search results again.

It is possible to use wildcards to replace one character (?) or multiple characters (*). The search is performed fast, probably not as fast as in search engines that make use of a database or other means of storing file information to increase search speed. It does usually take a few seconds to display the results which is perfectly acceptable for most uses.

TheSearchMan will not search within files. Users who do need that functionality might take a look at Locate32 which offers that. TheSearchMan on the other hand is a lightweight – most likely one of the smallest if not the smallest – desktop search application (50 KB unpacked) that can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

Users from the United States get on-page previews of the contents of each site by hovering the mouse cursor over a search result while users from unsupported countries do not get these previews. The previews can contain up to five links to other content of the site which is an interesting feature as search engines usually limit the exposure to one or two links to a site on each page. Many aspects of Bing look like Google Search. There are sponsored advertisements on top of the search results pages and on the left. Bing will also add related content like images where appropriate to the results.

Bing categorizes search results where appropriate. A search for New York will start with all results on the top and display categories like maps, weather, travel or attractions below each with a handful of search results. This is actually an interesting concept as it might aid inexperienced users in their search. Experienced users on the other hand will perform targeted searches to find the information they are looking for.

Bing will display the categories, related searches and the search history on the left. The image search of Bing displays image results on an infinite scrolling page with options to filter images by size, layout, color, style or people. A virtual map can be displayed which is really interesting for location based searches. It will for instance link pictures to locations on the map.

Bing Video search makes it possible to play videos directly on the results page. This can be done by hovering the mouse over a video or by clicking on the play button that appears when hovering over the video. Videos can also be filtered by length, resolution, screen size or source.

Bing offers some comfort function and elements that users will not find using Google Search. It seems to be targeting English speaking users only at this point as they can access features that users from non-English speaking countries cannot (unless they change their country to USA or UK). Everything on the other hand comes down to the quality of the search results. Bing seems to have improved over Windows Live, especially for popular search terms.

Tag 2 Find uses a different approach. It brings the tags known from indexing websites to the computer desktop. It is currently available in a preview version for the Windows operating system. Users who have been using services like Delicious and Flickr or run their own blog will be immediately comfortably with the software program. Any file located on the computer system can be tagged by the user. No user would want to tag all files as this would mean to work with hundreds of thousands of files which could take a lifetime. The software program can assist the user by automatically suggesting tags based on file names, directory names, file extensions and even metadata for multimedia files.

It is furthermore possible to include and exclude drives from the program completely. The software program will display a wizard after installation that is walking the user through the first initial configuration. The user can pick drives, directories and files that he wants to tag right away. Tag 2 Find can also be integrated in Windows Explorer to add tags right away for selected files.

It would be impracticable if the application window would have to be opened to search the files and tags. The application is therefor offering a floating transparent search window that can be moved around on the computer desktop. Entering tags into that search form will open another transparent connected window that is displaying the results which include hits, partial hits and related tags. A click on a resulting tag will show all the file names that have been tagged with the word or phrase.

Tag 2 Find can monitor the computer system for new files. The folders that are monitored can be defined in the application. It is for instance monitoring the Windows Clipboard and will display files that are copied to it for a while waiting for user input.

Additional options that might be interesting for some users are access to a tag cloud, automatic category management for selected file types, color coding tabs, drag and drop support plus import and export options for tags. It is really surprising how stable and extensive this early version of the software program is.

The only downside is the rather large resource usage. The software program uses roughly 23 Megabytes of computer memory while displaying the floating tags search box and about 53 Megabytes of virtual memory. Tag 2 Find runs on Windows XP or Windows Vista and requires the Microsoft .net Framework 2.0, an NTFS formatted file system (at least on the partitions that contain files that the user wants to tag and administrative privileges during installation.

The document formats that get added by the filter pack are .docx, .docm, .pptx, .pptm, .xlsx, .xlsm, .xlsb, .zip, .one, .vdx, .vsd, .vss, .vst, .vdx, .vsx, and .vtx whcih are basically all the new document formats that have been introduced in Microsoft Office 2007.

An IFilter basically allow the Windows Indexing Service and Windows Desktop Search so that these file formats become searchable in Windows. The Microsoft Filter Pack can be installed on Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista or Windows XP.

The Microsoft page states that the software package has been updated to version 2 on October 9 although the download is still for the Microsoft Filter Pack 1.0.

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 Indexer Status (via Genbeta) Gadget has another interesting function which is probably even more useful than displaying the information about the search indexing process. Users can pause and resume the Windows indexer which is excellent if you want to make sure that the application that you start in a few seconds will have all possible system resources available.

Users who have installed the Windows Live 4.0 search update which is a preview release can enable its Index Now feature in Indexer Status as well.

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.

I did mention Locate before here at Ghacks and thought that this awesome program deserves another article. The software developer is constantly working on Locate and he has added several new functions since the last time that I wrote a review about it. The biggest change in this new version of Locate is the Find as you type function. Locate does not wait anymore until the user presses the submit button to find files or text in files but presents results immediately.

You can still filter results in so many ways that it would take ten articles to explain all the options. It is possible to filter by file size, file date, extension and file path for instance. Normal file searches take about a second before all results are displayed, it takes a bit longer to search for content in files naturally but it is fast as well if you consider that all files on all hard drives can be searched.

I would suggest to schedule daily updates for Locate if you have the intention to use it regularly. You can either configure this option in Locate but the application has to be running to start the file update process on its own or you can use the task scheduler of Windows to update the Locate database regularly.

It scans your hard drives initially for all files, writes them to a database and offers a basic search form that can be spiced up with advanced search options. The basic search lets you search for filenames, extensions and specific locations on your hard drive. Advanced search parameters let you specify minimum and maximum file sizes, file age and other parameters like searching for files and folders or matching names only.

After the initial scan which takes a few minutes normally all search results are presented in 1-2 seconds. The speed is really incredibly and it is well worth using it. I wish there was a way to replace the Windows search with Locate for Windows.

Locate comes with its own scheduler that can update the file database on a regular basis. Those updates don’t take long because only new files will be added to the database (and old removed). There are so many options available that it would take a book to describe them all.

To sum it up. Locate is the best file search for Windows that I encountered so far. A must have software.

Read More:

Locate for Windows
Locate Introduction (Screencast from Donation Coder)

The new Snowbird is highly customizable – you can edit the new catalog file and add new categories under which results are placed, specify what type of files appear under each category and you can minimize Snowbird to the system tray and continue with your work. Whenever you need to find something, just pop Snowbird up, type in your search, and let it search in the background as you continue your work.