Microsoft has tried to make a "better" search before, by redesigning the file system and the metadata that can be tied to files.
The idea was that you could search this:
> the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month
They had hyped this up as coming in Project Longhorn (which was eventually split into Vista and salvaged in Windows 7), but the new filesystem was eventually dropped like their other attempts:
They should implement simple search first, so I don't need to reach grep for everything. Then they should implement pdftotext and fuzzy search. Of course everything should work instantly for small folders. That would be enough for 99% people.
A million times this. Windows search is, as near as I can tell, completely worthless and I have to install other utilities to have working basic search.
I don't need or want anything fancy like semantic searching. I just want to be able to grep and find things by filename.
The server version called "Windows Search Services" was rather alright. It was even integrated into the Win7 Libraries and you could search through contents server-side from Explorer.
It supported plugins and was reasonably fast. Needed a lot of RAM though and some admin to babysit it.
The idea was that you could search this:
> the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month
They had hyped this up as coming in Project Longhorn (which was eventually split into Vista and salvaged in Windows 7), but the new filesystem was eventually dropped like their other attempts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS