Search files in a flash with SwiftSearch

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Windows 8 has pretty decent file-search capabilities built in, especially if you learn a few tricks for smarter searches.

Of course, not everyone has (or wants) Windows 8, and even those who do may find Microsoft's search engine lacking.

Check out SwiftSearch, a free, portable search utility that's remarkably small and remarkably fast. With it you can find just about any file, on any drive, in about the time it takes to read this sentence. In fact, forget sentence; the time it takes to read this word!

SwiftSearch has nothing to install; it's a fully self-contained executable, which explains its "portable" nature: You can run it from your hard drive or keep it on a flash drive if you're looking to build out your portable toolset.

Either way, it loads in seconds. All you do is type your search parameters and then click Search. I'm not sure how the program returns results so quickly giving that it doesn't index your drive (which is how Windows Search operates), but it does.

SwiftSearch also supports a variety of expressions you can use to perform more exacting searches, though these will definitely take a bit of study if you're not accustomed to searching this way. Click Help, Regular expressions for a cheat-sheet of the expressions you can use.

Once you've got your results, you can right-click any item for a menu of options, including Open and Open Containing Folder.

Much as I'm loving SwiftSearch, the program isn't perfect. Although you can sort your search results by clicking any of the column headers (Name, Directory, etc.), there's no file-type option. I want that for grouping things like Word documents and JPEG images.

Also, it would be nice if you could focus searches on a specific folder, but SwiftSearch works only with entire drives.

That said, if you find that it's meeting your search needs, you could even consider turning off Windows' search indexing, which may make your PC run faster. See Chris Null's "Software Speed Boosts for Your PC" to find out how.

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter (which is included in the Power Tips newsletter) e-mailed to you each week.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
More by Rick Broida

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Building Bing Smart Search for Windows 8.1

This blog post is part of a series of guest posts we’re publishing this week from different people in groups across Microsoft who helped us build Windows 8.1. – Brandon

My name is Kieran Snyder, and I’m a Group Program Manager in the Bing User Experience team. My team was responsible for working hand-in-hand with Windows engineering to build the new Bing Smart Search in Windows 8.1. I’m excited to tell you a little bit about our work with the Windows team to build what is one of the coolest and most visible improvements to Windows 8, and highlight a few of my favorite things, now that it will be broadly available to everyone tomorrow.

Integration from the Start

The Bing/Windows collaboration on Smart Search for the Windows 8.1 update started with our work on Windows 8 when our teams worked together to build the Bing search app. The focus for that app was a cross-team effort to create a modern, fast and fluid search experience that was great for touch, and took advantage of what the revolutionary Windows 8 platform offered. Both teams brought different perspectives to the table in those first days of collaboration. Bing brought a deep knowledge of core search, including experience with experimentation and agile development, expertise in machine learning and relevance, and specialized knowledge in multimedia. Windows was embracing modern design, and brought the kind of unrelenting attention to detail and craftsmanship that is essential when you’re shipping software to a billion people around the world. And as we worked through that initial project across teams – and I was actually a Group Program Manager in the Windows team at the time – we realized how much more opportunity there was to rethink what search should be and to build something really great for people that brought all the pieces together.

From the start of Windows 8.1 development both the Windows and Bing engineering teams knew that we wanted to go all in on search – together. For me personally, the Windows 8 collaboration brought me back to my old roots in natural language processing and got me hooked on the search space, so when work began on Windows 8.1 I moved to the Bing team to learn everything I could about it. But, to make a cross-company collaborative project work at this scale, you need a truly diverse set of individuals involved. On the Bing side we started building a new team to work on Smart Search that drew from a wide variety of expertise and backgrounds. Our team now includes people with advanced graduate degrees and some straight out of college; folks with varied perspective as designers, developers, researchers and marketers; people with experience in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer, Visual Studio, as well as companies outside of Microsoft and the startup scene. And that’s just our small corner of Bing. All told, nearly 1,000 people in Bing have contributed to Smart Search in some way, including program managers, developers, testers, designers, researchers and our colleagues in business development and marketing.

Rethinking what search should and could be

The promise of creating something together – making a modern search experience that includes the best of Windows search and the best of web search all in one place was an exciting challenge. We knew we wanted to help people find what they needed, no matter where it lived or what it was. We asked ourselves, “Why should someone have to remember where they saved something? What if there is a forgotten note or picture tucked away that can be helpful; how would you know to go look for it? Shouldn’t Windows help you find all of that?” That was the underlying goal with Smart Search – let you simply swipe or type to find everything, all in one place. Whether it is a document on your PC, an app you downloaded months ago, a picture stored in SkyDrive or a website, Bing Smart Search will bring it to the surface. As you’ll see, Smart Search helps you find stuff fast wherever it lives.

A challenge with designing search that works everywhere was reconciling how people have historically searched on Windows versus how they have historically searched on the Web. Consider what we call “query formulation”, which is when you enter your search term in the search box. On the web, when you enter a query in the Bing search box, hitting enter launches a search query for exactly the string you’ve typed – like this:

But in the world of Windows when typing “sky” and pressing enter, you expect to launch SkyDrive directly, rather than searching for “sky” and getting a web search results page. It took us many rounds of iteration to make sure the Smart Search experience exactly preserved web search expectations, but didn’t compromise the efficiency of quick commanding in Windows. Notice how typing “sky” in Smart Search surfaces SkyDrive, as well as related Control Panel settings, and more:

That is just one example of the challenges we had ahead of us to rethink the search experience for a new and improved Windows experience. We quickly realized that even with a great team and a strong partnership, this wasn’t going to be easy!

Leveraging Satori for the Windows canvas

Within the varied backgrounds of our two teams were also many strengths that have given us the opportunity to look beyond the constraints of a traditional search box and create transformative experiences that are unlike anything you can find in other products. My favorite example of this is a feature we call “search heroes.”

To provide background on the search heroes I want to outline a little context on some pretty cool technology that most people don’t know about. For many years, Bing has invested in Satori, which is essentially a repository of the many people, places, events, and objects in the world – what we call entities – and more importantly the relationships between them. At last count, and this changes due to the constant changing nature of the web, Satori includes hundreds of millions of entities and understand billions of points of information linking them together. Satori provides the foundation for our Snapshot experiences on Bing.com, so that when you search for your favorite celebrity or famous landmark, you get an arrangement of facts, biographical information, images and other key information in addition to the most relevant web results.

Windows 8.1 provides a fantastic, full-bleed canvas where apps can shine, and we realized pretty quickly how the investment made in Satori could be leveraged across this canvas for a Smart Search experience that is beautiful as well as functional. Search heroes take this vast set of structured data that Bing has about the world and turns it into something that feels beautiful, curated, and relevant – something that looks and feels like the best modern apps. Thanks to Satori and Bing, you can think of these experiences as mini-apps that Windows creates on the fly. As you would expect of an experience built for Windows, they include deep links into your Windows applications to help you get stuff done.

Take music, as an example, which has been one of the most popular categories in the Release Preview. With Bing, Windows, and the Xbox team working together, we can present a big, beautiful answer that puts the most relevant information and actions front and center. We are able to include immediate music playback of all the most popular songs in the Xbox Music catalog, serve up music videos, launch apps that can help you go deeper and get more done, and surface other information that is easily accessible with a swipe of your finger. Across Windows, Xbox, and Bing, we built something that none of these teams could have made in isolation.

Dynamic and agile

There isn’t a single part of the Smart Search experience that hasn’t been built in collaboration across our teams, including our state of the art image search and our results page that combines relevant results from Windows, apps, the web, and your personal content from SkyDrive. But perhaps the most critical investment that we’ve made together is our update pipeline and flighting service, which allows Bing to deploy new search features and refinements to Windows every single day. Now you can get critical search updates every time you use Windows – versus waiting for periodic updates. With Smart Search we dynamically reflect the ever-changing web, we can learn what’s popular and what’s not, we can try out new experiences to see how well people like them, and we can improve your experience daily. This is the largest-scale investment in server-side development for Windows that Microsoft has ever made, and it took incredible commitment on the part of the Windows team to build this. More than any other part of our collaboration, this is what sets us up to make new, dynamic experiences together for years to come, delivering what people need when they need it.

One Microsoft

Building something together in such a close way is often hard at a big company. From the very beginning of this project, Katie Frigon, my counterpart in Windows, and I have had full commitment to a shared design process. For fifteen months now, every User Interface PM and designer on the project has gotten together for two hours every Friday morning to share work in progress and to critique and discuss together. These design forums are meetings we continue to have as we look to our next set of features and investments. There is just no substitute for having everyone on a project in the same room together week in and week out to make the project work. We hold shared architecture reviews and code reviews for developers. The lead designers on the project recently gave a presentation to user experience leads around the company about this design process so they can share their learnings. Windows and Bing user researchers test each other’s features in the lab and run shared studies. At all levels of the company and across all disciplines, collaboration has been open, effective, and frequent, and I’m thrilled about what this has allowed us to build together and excited about what comes next.

Smart Search is just the beginning of what’s new in Windows 8.1. We can’t wait for you to check it out! If you have Windows 8, (tomorrow) just go to the Windows Store on the Start screen and get the update. If you don’t yet have Windows 8 or are waiting for all the great devices coming this holiday season, you can head to www.bing.com/smartsearch to see it in action and get a feel for what you’re missing.

Kieran Snyder
Group Program Manager
Bing User Experience Team

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Review: CloudMagic's personalized Web search service grows up

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

CloudMagic is growing up. This super-speedy search service debuted a few years ago and over time has evolved to offer some very useful features, including Facebook and Twitter search. Now, though, CloudMagic is making some of its biggest changes yet, including the ability to integrate your personal search results with Google's global Web results. And the company is no longer offering unlimited searches for free, a move that may alienate some users. However, 50 free searches a month will suffice for many; the unlimited searches of the Pro subscription costs $5 a month.

CloudMagic's core search tools work the same as always: you sign up for an account, and link the services you'd like it to search. It supports a huge range of services, including AOL, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Facebook, Gmail, Google Apps, Google Talk, GMX, Hotmail, iCloud, Mail.com, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, Microsoft Office 365, MSN, Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Twitter, Windows Live, and Yahoo.

Once access has been granted, CloudMagic then begins indexing your accounts, which can take some time if your accounts are sizable. It took several hours to index a Gmail account containing thousands of messages, but only a few minutes to index a newer Twitter account. You can begin searching right away, but waiting until the indexing process is complete will deliver more accurate results.

CloudMagic displays your own personal results in an unobtrusive box that appears alongside Google's Web results.

The service is still available as it has been in the past, as a browser extension for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, an add-on for Internet Explorer, and a mobile app for the iPad, iPhone, and Android devices.  The browser extensions and add-ons appear as simple search box on any relevant Web pages; if you surf to a page that doesn't support CloudMagic, you don't see the box. You can move the search box around the page if it's in your way, and you can minimize it to a corner, too.

You enter your keywords in the search box, and CloudMagic goes to work, instantly (and I do mean instantly) displaying results as you type. The results appear in a column that appears below the CloudMagic search box as soon as you begin typing. Results are organized by source; if you enter a search string while on your Gmail page, you'll see results from there, but you also can scroll down to see results from your other accounts, like Facebook and Twitter. In CloudMagic's latest iteration, the results are as accurate as speedy as they have always been.

What's new about CloudMagic is how you can access its search results. It  is no longer limited to displaying results in its own search box. CloudMagic now lets you see your personal CloudMagic results when conducting Google searches. This feature, which is available using Chrome, Firefox, and Safari with the browser extension installed (except Internet Explorer) works whenever you enter a search query in Google. CloudMagic displays your personal results—from any accounts you've indexed—alongside your Google search results. If you search for a local restaurant on the Web, CloudMagic could, for example, display any tweets or Facebook status messages your friends may have posted about it. It's a handy way to mix personal and global Web search together. Results are displayed right on Google's results pages, in a box that appears to the right side of Google's results. You can see messages, tweets, Google docs, and more, all of which are organized by source, just like any other CloudMagic results.  They don't interfere with your Google results, as they sit off to the side, but when a relevant result is returned, it's easily accessible.

While all users will appreciate CloudMagic's new search tools, some may not appreciate the new price tag that comes along with using them too frequently. CloudMagic is still offering a free version, but it's not unlimited, as it was in the past. The free version of CloudMagic is for users who need less than 50 "previews" a month; anyone needing more will have to pay $5 a month for its Pro account. CloudMagic considers a preview the action you take after getting the search result, in which you click the result that seems relevant and you're shown a quick preview of the content it returned.

In all of the time that I've been using CloudMagic, I've never used more than 50 previews per month, but if I needed to search more often, I'd be willing to pay for CloudMagic Pro. $5 a month is a small price to pay for one of the best search services around.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Using a Combo Box to search as you type

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

(Guest blogger, Molly Pell is a Senior Systems Analyst at FMS, Inc., a leading Access applications company, which designs custom solutions to improve operations for small and large organizations in all sectors.)

Here's a neat trick that you can use to filter a Continuous or Split form while your users are typing in a Combo Box. As the user types, the form filter updates to display full or partial matches for the value entered. 

This example uses a slightly modified version of the Northwind 2007 Template, available for download from Microsoft. The "Customer List" form is a Split form that displays a list of all customers. We want to allow users to filter this list to easily find a customer, even without knowing the full customer name.

To do this, we add a Combo Box named cboFilter, with the following notable properties:

 

Here's what our form looks like:

Then in the Change event of the Combo Box, we add the following code:

Private Sub cboFilter_Change()

  ' If the combo box is cleared, clear the form filter.
  If Nz(Me.cboFilter.Text) = "" Then
Me.Form.Filter = ""
Me.FilterOn = False
  ' If a combo box item is selected, filter for an exact match.
' Use the ListIndex property to check if the value is an item in the list.
ElseIf Me.cboFilter.ListIndex <> -1 Then
Me.Form.Filter = "[Company] = '" & _
Replace(Me.cboFilter.Text, "'", "''") & "'"
Me.FilterOn = True
  ' If a partial value is typed, filter for a partial company name match.
Else
Me.Form.Filter = "[Company] Like '*" & _
Replace(Me.cboFilter.Text, "'", "''") & "*'"
Me.FilterOn = True

  End If
  ' Move the cursor to the end of the combo box.
Me.cboFilter.SetFocus
Me.cboFilter.SelStart = Len(Me.cboFilter.Text)

End Sub

Now as the user types, the customer list automatically updates. If the user types an exact match, the list is filtered for an exact match. If the user types a partial match, the list is filtered for any company whose name contains the string. If the user clears the combo box, the filter is cleared.

Note that this same thing can be done with a text box, but using a combo box adds the extra perk of making all values available in the drop down.

For more combo box tips, check out our Top 5 Combo Box Tips for Access at FMS, Inc. 

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Better search in Outlook 2010

A common problem with e-Mail addiction is that they may return too many results. For example by typing someone's name may return matches where appears the name in parts of the body of the message, even though you should search for messages from that person. There may be other criteria to narrow help enter your search how hard, whether it has an attachment or that a certain category has applied. It would not be great, if you simply specify this parameter and get a better results - find what you want, or faster? Outlook 2010 makes it easier!

Outlook 2010 helps your mailbox searching more efficiently with two new features: search search contextual tab in the Ribbon and the suggestion list.

Contextual search tab

The contextual search tab is displayed every time that you click in the search box. It allows you, your search results with a variety of parameters, including filter:

· The sender name

Subject keywords ·

· Presence of attachments

· Categories

· Sent date

· Flagged messages

· The name of the recipient in the to or CC

· Importance

Read/unread status ·

•... and much more!

You can use this tab so that you can quickly and easily find news. For example, suppose you are looking after a message with the phrase "Food Blog", but more than 100 elements return the search query. Let's assume that you also remind you that this message has an attachment. Now you can limit immediately, to find the results to a much smaller what you seek, by clicking the attachments in the contextual tab set search:

And this is just one of the many filters in search contextual tab available!

Search suggestion list

A combination of keywords, along with the name of the sender or a well-known phrase in the subject line contain the vast majority of the search. Restrict the results to a specific sender is a powerful filter which helps often quickly narrow down results.

If you start a query, you see a list below the search field to Outlook 2010. You can just type and then Arrorw after the search to e-Mail from a person or to a specific topic below limited. The results returned are only those who show a match in the name (or subject) against your query!

This is just a taste of the new powerful search capabilities integrated into Outlook 2010. We hope you enjoy this new experience and that it helps you more productive every time you will need to find a message in your mailbox.

Nelson Siu
Outlook program manager

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The fastest way search commands in Office (video)

Love the Ribbon or hate it, here is a way to find things faster: Search commands, free download of Office Labs:

Get the free download search commands for Office 2007 and Office 2010 at Office Labs. It works for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

--Doug Thomas

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"Zoo closed, Cobra is missing": they have tried Outlook Instant Search?

If things are missing in your business, how much time go waste tracking? The instant search in Outlook might be in a position to help.

The world of reptiles make on the Bronx Zoo shut down recently because of an unpredictable Egyptian Cobra. I saw the headline and thought to myself: "now how many times I had to the business to a missing Cobra search to close?"

Okay, so I have actually never lethal reptiles had to breakaway (knock on wood) deal with. But there are plenty of time in a crucial document or piece of information has gone missing, and it was all hands on deck, until we (insert huge amount wasted time here) tracked it down. But that happened a long time me not in one, and it is not because I'm better about things not to lose. It is because of the instant search in Outlook 2007 and 2010.

Almost all important things, where I work, associated with e-Mail, and search in Outlook, I have to make about 50 different ways to find what I need. Fast. That most of the time, Outlook searches the item before I even have you enter the search term.

You probably already use the search box in Outlook; It is an easy way to your Outlook folders, find an item search. What you might not know is that you can also use search commands to get better search results. These commands save key at the time which are for me.

The basic syntax is as follows: command: Word. If you want to find email from Jonathan, you give, for example, from the search box, followed by a colon and Jonathan: from: Jonathan. Necessary without spaces.

Here is my short list of the top Outlook search commands:

by: person  If I am interested in me for something, and I know that you sent.to: person  If I want to make sure I sent the e-Mail, I said I have.And  If I want to search more than one word. Note that you use capital letters and spaces for logical operators such as AND, OR or not. Use of words that belong together, like "Naja Haje", quotation marks around them. HasAttachment: yes Instant Search also, examined equipment so that if you are looking for a term, not in the message but is in the system search, Outlook can find it.received: yesterday you can also received: last week or even received: 4/2/2011 (sorry, received: morning does not work).

It will be really fun if you combine commands. You can separate multiple commands with semicolons. I could use from: Jonathan; Hasattachment: yes snakes and Cobras find for example to the e-Mail of Jonathan with his attachment to Cobras.

You can find much more Outlook search commands here. If you have a favorite command-saving time, please share it in the comments. And here's hoping that your venomous snakes go missing again and again not.

The Cobra find eventually, by the way. Wonder how many small rodents they are missing now...

--Doug Kim

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