Jeffrey Snover[1] likes to say that "Microsoft is incapable of sustained error", yet they've been incapable of building a good search for at least 15-20 years that I've experienced. Bing search is no competitor to Google, Explorer filesystem search is slow and untrustworthy, the search which integrates desktops to Windows server indexing of fileshares is slow and untrustworthy, on-premises SharePoint search has never worked well for finding documents for me, Start Menu search is the worst at matching plain text strings in short names year after year, Windows version after Windows version, local Outlook Search wasn't great, Outlook search backed by Exchange isn't great, and it goes easily back to Joel on Software's blog post[2] of
2004 where he says
> Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973.
That's still what I want, and still what they don't do.
[1] PowerShell originator, now "Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management Group" at Microsoft.
[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
> Just do me a favor and search the damned hard drive, quickly, for the string I typed, using full-text indexes and other technologies that were boring in 1973.
That's still what I want, and still what they don't do.
[1] PowerShell originator, now "Chief Architect for the Azure Infrastructure and Management Group" at Microsoft.
[2] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...