Learn to Use Windows Search Like a Pro

This article series explains how to use Windows Search.

Lesson 1: Stop hunting and start searching!

All your stuff on your computer is great until you can find it. You may have a ton of photos, documents, music, and even videos hiding on your hard drive, so you might not even know what you have. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just type a few words into the search field and magically display your content?

Lesson 2: New look and some new tricks

Search is well integrated into Windows. So much so that if you use a keyboard, you can pretty much control your entire computer with just a few keystrokes. In this tutorial, we’ll start showing you how to do it so you can become a search master!

Lesson 3

Desktop search has been a staple of Windows for a long time, but many users don’t know how useful it really is. When you search from your desktop, you can find anything, anywhere, including non-indexed locations. This means you really have nothing to lose if you know how to look for it!

Lesson 4

Finding your data with Windows Search doesn’t require you to know or even care about advanced query syntax, but if you have thousands of images, music files, and videos, then it certainly helps. AQS really shines when you’ve saved your stuff in a safe place but can’t remember where it is, so even if you lose something, it will never be lost if you know how to look for it!

Lesson 5

We come to our last lesson in our Windows Search series, and logically we end up with what we’ve been building all along: advanced query syntax, namely AQS parameters. Understanding these options and how to use them will give your searches the extra joy they sorely need and ultimately turn you into a search master!