classsic shell search

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Is the classic search using the windows search tool behind but just presents the results differently?

Can someone explain how it works and if it indexes content too if it is not related to the windows indexer?

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Right click on the taskbar and open Task Manager. Under processes there are a couple of Cortana processes and the Microsoft Windows search Indexer. Type in Classic Shell search box and I think you will find activity in Microsoft Windows search Indexer.
The Cortana processes are related to MS\Bing searches. There are settings in the GUI, GPEdit (if you have the Pro version) and RegEdit (CAUTION if you understand what you’re doing) to REDUCE exposure to Cortana\Bing. But short of disabling Cortana (which also disables search in the taskbar, maybe the Win10 menu, and who-knows what else) which I do not recommend, there is no way that I’ve found to really disengage Cortana.

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Thanks. I don’t care as much to disable Cortana completely as much as get a better search than whar Cortana offers. It is completely ridiculous that I have to always filter by document tomsee my files instead of just pressing Windows key, type what I search and see them right away. Cortana search is a very bad substitute for the previous Windows search interface. I want all files all the time, not best match that returns nothing then click on documents to see my document. It is ridiculous. I reproduced the problem on another computer. Note I disabled everything I could legitimately using the GUI like Cortana gets to know me and disabled web results. First time I search the file appears in best match, thne it never appears again unless I click on filter by documents after no best match, as if Cortana decided it was a document and thus not worth showing in best match anymore to favor some stupid web results first that I disabled so nothing comes out of the search. How lame!

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Ok, I did some testing and found the problem. I think it might be interesting to some people.

It happens on Anniversary Update and I think it is a bug.

It happens if you move the default folders location to a different partition. Funny we just had a discussion about moving the folders and I never had any issue with this before because I did it the right way as ch100 suggests (right-click on the special folder, move to a different location) and I don’t use bad programs that have the locations hardcoded or other unprofessional handling of this supported and normal feature of Windows.

I’m more like Noel on this and if I could get rid of all those special folders, I would, but unfortunately, some programs write in them and if you want to backup easily your second partition with everything saved from those programs or just save the data from those users that click on “yes wipe completely and reinstall my computer (hear the C drive) to try to fix my problem” when Windows asks, it makes it easier. Yes, it happened to some people when their computer didn’t start and they were so glad I moved all their things on the second partition years ago before leaving them on their own with their computer, because they thought they were doing backups and they weren’t, so the less standard setting was very helpful in preventing a disaster.

Now it is even worse as we have the old special folders for desktop applications, the new redundant special folders for the store apps, the librairies hidden somewhere, but I diverge.

Ok, so here it is:
If you move the folder location to a second partition, Windows Search which is now Cortana suddenly suffers from schizophrenia and if you type the name of your document, it will not return it as Best match anymore. However, it will still be indexed and if you click on filter by documents, the search result will appear. That is a pretty bad bug. Is anybody here able to file a bug at Microsoft? I think it is one of the hardest thing to do after changing your default search engine for good in Internet Explorer or Edge. I tried a very long time ago for Office and they asked me to pay 350$ for the privilege of reporting a bug, so I let the bug I found linger since then in every subsequent version.

Next thing to test: does classic shell prevents this nonsense? I really don’t want to have to click 2 times each time I search a file in Windows, not counting the fact it is hard to see if you typed wrong when no search results are shown by default, so that means I would have to start typing, click filter by documents, continue to type if I made a mistake or I didn’t remember the right word to search for.

<rant due to too much time lost trying to make Windows 10 likeable>
Sigh. This is just the drop that makes the water spill. Thanks for helping me be more productive, Windows 10. I remember when I first saw the announcement for Edge and Win 10, I was so happy, I thought you understood our needs for simple, fast, stable, no ActiveX security and privacy, I was excited that maybe I would use Edge, that you would do like CEIP in Windows 7 with an easy opt-out to respect my privacy, that you would simplify our computing experience and make it easy to disable anything we don’t want, that not only Enterprise version users would benefit from more security and privacy features because you know, this is not something that should be reserved for the elite. You promised me so much Microsoft, but you ended up just doing things for your Enterprise friends and you even removed features that were there for so long in the Pro version. I feel betrayed and even more when your PR people lie and brag about better security for features I can’t even use and they try to scare me about the imaginary dangers of running Windows 7.
</rant due to too much time lost trying to make Windows 10 likeable>

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

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See my post above. I believe Classic Shell search box uses Microsoft Windows Search Indexer. If you use the taskbar default search box you are using Cortana/Bing. There is a setting in Classic Shell to not search the web. Also there is (used to be?) a setting in Windows that defines the indexing.

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@AlexEiffel
I don’t have a particular interest in this subject and Classic Shell, so I will not dig deeper to get to the root cause of this issue related to Search which we discussed previously in a different thread. It may just be a bug which will be fixed in future versions of Windows 10 if there is enough interest in it from the users and Microsoft.
However, if you are looking for possible leads now, check the registry keys for the user Special Folders and you will see differences in Windows 10 vs Windows 7. I don’t know how this is done in Windows 8.x.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders

You will find references to GUIDs now for every special folder in Windows 10.
In Windows 7, only newer implementations like Downloads had a GUID in the same area of the registry.

Do you use a file server to redirect folders, or the same PC?
Susan Bradley has notified Microsoft about a related issue where by installing Windows Search on File Servers, specific functionality which I think was network access to shares gets broken in Windows 10/2016. There is a hotfix in the Catalog for this issue which has not made it yet in the regular CUs as far as I understand.
Please be aware that I am not monitoring this thread and I may not notice future replies from you or other posters in relation to this subject.

1 user thanked author for this post.

AlexEiffel

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No, I don’t use a file server, same PC, second partition.

Thanks for your tips anyway. I think even in 1511 there was a bit of problems according to what I saw online, so my hopes of seeing this bug fixed anytime soon are not very high. So although I am not a huge fan of third-party OS complements, for now classic shell will be mandatory for me. My users will continue to click two times for now, they are never searching as often as I do.

It is not the first bug I find in Windows Search. In 8, I found a bug where the apostrophe wasn’t recognized as such because there are two types of apostrophes, on straight, one curved and depending on your keyboard you might not get the same one as Windows. It got fixed at some point in 8.1, but that d*** bug appeared again with Windows 10 and it doesn’t seem to be fixed now. So, whenever I search for something that contains an apostrophe, I just search for some subset of the words in the search term.

1 user thanked author for this post.

ch100

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Windows Search has had problems and Bugs since at least W 7. Tun away CPU usage, what your experiences have bee, etc.

The way I fixed it is not to use it!!! I Turn of the Indexer, I have turn of Search itself but some services and software don’t like it when they can’t see it.
I use “Total Commander File Manager“. It has a far superior Search facility, and it is FAST, FAST!!! MS does not seem to have any compulsion to fix this or Explorer anymore that they do IE, which shares allot of these subsystems back and forth.

Problem Solved…

--------------------------------------

1. Tower Totals: 2xSSD ~512GB, 2xHHD 20 TB, Memory 32GB

SSDs: 6xOS Partitions, 2xW8.1 Main & Test, 2x10.0 Test, Pro, x64

CPU i7 2600 K, SandyBridge/CougarPoint, 4 cores, 8 Threads, 3.4 GHz
Graphics Radeon RX 580, RX 580 ONLY Over Clocked
More perishable

2xMonitors Asus DVI, Sony 55" UHD TV HDMI

1. NUC 5i7 2cores, 4 Thread, Memory 8GB, 3.1 GHz, M2SSD 140GB
1xOS W8.1 Pro, NAS Dependent, Same Sony above.

-----------------

3 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, AlexEiffel, ch100

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Ok I just tested Classic Shell. Pretty nice thing. I knew about it but never felt the need to use it before until this search bug came out.

So if you install Classic Shell, the bug doesn’t manifest itself.

The lesson is, if you move the special folders in Windows to a different partition, which can be a very reasonable thing to do for lots of reasons and for lots of people despite some drawbacks in some contexts, Windows Search in AU will be broken. You will always have to click filter by documents to see your search results when you look for a document. It is very annoying.

So the way I solved this issue is by installing Classic Shell, only the component relevant to the Start Menu.

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I have been using ClassicShell since 2009 on Win 7, 8.1, and 10.

I like that you can exclude Internet Searches via the configuration. And EVERYTHING about it can be configured. It’s a better implemented, more integrated start menu than anything Microsoft has ever written.

I don’t ever leave Microsoft’s Indexing enabled on any of my systems, and the ClassicShell search seems to complete immediately. I have powerful hardware and am running from SSD, so it might just be doing the search interactively, but somehow I doubt it.

-Noel

3 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, AlexEiffel, HiFlyer

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This is interesting. After installing Classic Shell I thought it used the Windows indexer, just because of the way it was presented and the options in the settings that looked a bit like those of Windows. From what you are saying, it means it would not use the indexer at all? Does it have a service that indexes files then? Did you try searching for file content and not just name? I didn’t install it on my production Windows 7 machine with about 250 000 indexed files and I only had a few files on the test machine. It would have been nice to see how it behaves with that many files if there is no indexer. I am curious to see if it really indexes independently of Windows or if it just searches on the fly very efficiently but not the file content.

Also, you mentioned excluding Internet Searches. I did that with Cortana of course because I didn’t want those badly presented search results to pollute my local search space nor having my requests sent to MS or use that Bing search engine. However, after installing Classic Shell, a search on the web button was there even if my Cortana settings for that were off. I tried it and I liked it. Here’s why: I thought, but maybe I am wrong, that it had nothing to do with web results in Windows 10. I thought it was just a way to conveniently send my search terms to Firefox so I could save time by pressing the Windows key, type my web search terms then hit the search on the web button to instantly give me the google results in Firefox. This is nothing like Cortana because it didn’t actually seem to send my request on the web until I hit the button so nothing would be sent if I do a local search and also it doesn’t show me web results if I didn’t ask for them when doing a local search. So much better than Cortana. Maybe my hypothesis about the underlying way it works are wrong but it sure looks right from the outside. What’s not to love? You still don’t like it Noel? I bet maybe you have a faster way to fire up your web searches and that is why you don’t need it?

Do you have a shortcut key to start your browser in classic shell? I would love that. Since I don’t use the new bar introduced in Windows 7, I can’t use the native shortcuts on it with my icons located only in the quicklaunch bar. Is it just me or this Windows 7 launcher is terrible and a step back in useability? Vista was perfect in this regard and those were the days when the active window was clearly visible as a pressed button in the taskbar. I like to know clearly which apps are open and see each windows individually on the task bar and I find it important to quickly see the active window.

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I missed your response entirely, Alex. I’m sorry for taking so long to get back here.

I don’t use a shortcut key to start my browser, though I think you can if you work on the configuration. Classic Shell is VERY configurable.

I’m a bit old school – to start an Internet browser I prefer to double-click an icon, which I keep at the lower edge of my desktop on my center monitor. IE comes up virtually instantly, and I have a toolbar installed called Quero (one of very few Add-ons), which provides a separate search box to type into. Google gets that query and the results pop up. Just as I prefer it.

Classic Shell’s search occasionally finds applications locally for me that I’m too lazy to dig into the hierarchical menu to go get, though usually I prefer the structure of the hierarchy. In time it learns which results you choose most often and moves them to the top.

Note that I like my TaskBar on top, and it auto-hides.

With a suitable bit of hacking software one can re-theme Windows 8.1 so that you see a better TaskBar (that’s no longer possible in Win 10, they’ve done something fundamental to the TaskBar that prevents it). I have done so with a Win 7-like theme, so as with Win 7 the active application shows for me as a brighter button – though the way I have Aero Glass for Win 8+ set up the active window itself has a blue border while others are all gray, so it’s visible to me at a glance. With years using this highly polished setup, it’s all very natural, integrated, and productive for me now. It’s a good testament to why things shouldn’t be changed too often.

Note the skeuomorphic scroll bar thumb controls in the above. That’s another benefit from re-theming.

Microsoft has been reducing configurability in stages, but honestly I really like to be able to configure everything to work just so. It’s one of the reasons I like Classic Shell. Having done a lot of making things just so, my desktop honestly delights me at every use.

-Noel

3 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, ch100, AlexEiffel

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Noel,

I am so happy to find someone that seems as particular as me about seeing what Window is active. I don’t understand why people don’t get mad about this. I get instantly irritated not knowing which Window is the active one and I am usually a very patient person on lots of other matters and with computers too. There are a few things I really don’t like on the user GUI and it is not seeing my windows or having animations slow down what happens on my desktop. Windows 7 got me so mad with the Office active window bug that shows the wrong active window in Excel and the timid active window tinted button that replaced the perfectly clear pushed button on Vista that I have run 7 for years with the classic theme although I find it ugly and I don’t know why worse than the win 95 theme. I must say I forgot to notice how ugly it is as functionally, I didn’t have issues anymore and was very happy about that. The thing is I tried many months to adapt to the tinted button of 7 and was keeping clicking the wrong button many times per day until I just gave up and switched to classic theme.

I want to share with you that once I saw some other of your screen shots two weeks ago I noticed the top bar and it made me think that it seemed like a good idea and that it would require less travel to switch Windows having it on top plus other advantages like seeing them more easily because I wouldn’t have to look at the bottom and we often look higher. It all made sense, top-down approach, everything. So i gave it a try, thinking if Noel likes it, it must be good, but I must say I tried hard to adapt because it felt very unnatural to me and although I gave it some time, I just got sick of it and reverted to my comfortable bottom bar setup! I find the experience interesting and funny. Maybe I should have given it more time, but I was getting annoyed and felt an intense need to just put things back the way they were. Too many years with the bottom bar!

Your Windows 8.1 setup seems great. Unfortunately, I am only working on 10 now because although I wondered if I should just put 8.1, I decided to keep 7 group B on my main precious work desktop computer as it is fine like that and tried to tame 10 enough on my new temporary mobile, testing if the gpo I prepared will last after feature updates and to do some general testing of 10. At home I went from Vista to 10 as I wanted the latest REFS support. It makes no sense to me to downgrade to 8.1, although I think like you that tweaked, it was the best Windows version. I just try to embrace the new paradigm or maybe force myself into it enough that it will be a bigger incentive to move to something else sooner if I really hate it that much. I feel that for MS, 8.1 is already the past and that there will be even less consideration for this platform once 2020 arrives and market share for 10 absorbs a lot of 7 users. Normal folks whose computer will break before 2020 will likely just buy a 10 computer and might be less happy than with their 7 computers, but that won’t bring 8.1 from the dead. All of this to say that I am not impressed with the way Windows 10 is presenting some active windows like the Firefox one that has no title and only get a timid contour so I feel like it is a step back from before and I look at your desktop thinking maybe it is the last one we will have that is so great.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, Noel Carboni

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I have never had the TaskBar on the bottom. I was around from long before there was a taskbar, and it just seemed like things should stay on the top. Never had much interest in emulating Apple and their dock.

For what it’s worth, I do have Classic Shell et. al. polished up and working nearly as well on Windows 10, except for the inability to re-skin the TaskBar that I mentioned before. You CAN tell what task is active, but not very easily.

But I do have a replacement theme and have polished up the desktop some. I needed to see if I would be able to stand moving to Win 10.

-Noel

2 users thanked author for this post.

AlexEiffel, Elly

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@ AlexEiffel:

It’s very easy to add the old ‘Quick Launch’ Tool Bar to Windows 7, 8, and 10.

Here’s a link to the official MS web page for Windows 7:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/975784/guided-help-enable-the-quick-launch-bar-in-windows-7

This was about the 1st thing I did to Windows 7 when it came out and is done to every system I work on.

Here’s a link to activating it for 7, 8, and 10…same steps as long as you can get to the Task Bar:

https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-7/add-the-quick-launch-bar-to-the-taskbar-in-windows-7/

After adding it back, I then unpin all those stupid ‘pinned’ short cuts, because I, as you seem to do, do not want non-active ‘pinned’ icons on the Task Bar, except for the ‘hot’ ones I really want just to the right of a REAL start button!  Non-active program icons on the Task Bar are a waste of valuable space, and it’s hard to tell if they really represent a running program.

2 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, AlexEiffel

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Oh I have been doing that forever since 7. I never could stand that Mac inspired launcher that I feel was just hindering productivity by requiring more clicks to see what is open clearly. I was just asking if I am the only crazy one or if others share that disdain for the 7 and above launcher.

All my users have a Windows that looks a lot like XP in terms of GUI and use, quick launch area, active windows showed with their title in the bottom and not grouped unless there is no more space on the taskbar. Never been convinced of anything better. And I never get complaints, only questions about how to do that on their home computers.

You are right about inactive icons taking valuable space on the taskbar. I keep that to the most used programs in quicklaunch, I set small icons and use huge resolutions, so it ends up not being a problem. Of course, like you, I unpin the pinned icons.

1 user thanked author for this post.

Elly

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Thanks @SkipH. I had better luck with the howtogeek page, as the MS one had the Unlock Taskbar too low in the chain of instructions.

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Y’all,

The How to description are great, just thought I would add a Pic of how I have been doing it since my W 7 days, through w 8/8.1 and now IP W 10 Test partitions. The screen capture has a delay in W 10 so that is where I got this. I use a ‘.’ Library and put the Directory “Short Cuts” in it:

Hope that inspires some ideas….

--------------------------------------

1. Tower Totals: 2xSSD ~512GB, 2xHHD 20 TB, Memory 32GB

SSDs: 6xOS Partitions, 2xW8.1 Main & Test, 2x10.0 Test, Pro, x64

CPU i7 2600 K, SandyBridge/CougarPoint, 4 cores, 8 Threads, 3.4 GHz
Graphics Radeon RX 580, RX 580 ONLY Over Clocked
More perishable

2xMonitors Asus DVI, Sony 55" UHD TV HDMI

1. NUC 5i7 2cores, 4 Thread, Memory 8GB, 3.1 GHz, M2SSD 140GB
1xOS W8.1 Pro, NAS Dependent, Same Sony above.

-----------------

3 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, Noel Carboni, AlexEiffel

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