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You know what really ruptures my hot pocket? When even though you have a fast PC, you type in a search string in the file explorer,

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that progress bar inches toward the end, and then it just stops for enough time for you

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to just go and find the thing the old fashioned way.

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So what gives? Oh, and we're aware there's another Windows search that also sucks, but that'll be a

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topic for another video. It turns out that although the Windows file search can be immensely frustrating, it's

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actually just trying to be thorough. You see by default, Windows searches not only the file names, but also the file contents.

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And even if you have a really fast NVMe SSD, you're essentially asking the operating system

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to go through and examine nearly every byte on the drive.

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And with an individual drive potentially holding trillions of bytes, this can take a

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really long time. Of course, as frustrated as we get at Microsoft sometimes, they aren't stupid, and so they've

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tried to mitigate the problem with a feature called indexing.

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You probably heard this term if you've ever read about the way online search engines work,

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as they store information on webpages in a big index so that Google searches only take

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a few fractions of a second instead of hours.

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Similarly, Windows indexes the contents of your hard drive or SSD while your computer

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is at idle. So whenever you go to search for a file, it can bring up index results very quickly.

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So why can searches still take so long to complete then?

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What's going on is that although index results can come up in a few seconds after you type

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in your query, Windows does not index your whole system by default.

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Notably, the users folder containing personal documents, downloads, and data such as save

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games will get indexed, but the vast majority of the remainder of your drive will not.

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Additionally, many file types don't have their contents indexed by default either.

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Windows does index the contents of text files such as those with a .txt or .docx extension,

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but won't bother with most other file types, which can make finding what you're looking

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for even more tricky. Once Windows finishes searching through the index, it will then turn through all the non-index

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information on the disk, which the search feature has little to no advanced knowledge

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of, hence the hugely long wait times when searching large sections of your drive.

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Fortunately, the default settings can be tweaked to your liking.

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Bring up the control panel and click indexing options, then modify, where you can choose

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as many folders or drives as you'd like to add to the index.

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You can also click advanced, then file types, if there are certain kinds of files where

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you'd like to have Windows index the entire contents. There's even an option to delete and rebuild the index if you're continually experiencing

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issues with the search feature. There's also another way to speed things up when you actually run a search in File Explorer.

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Click view, then options, then the search tab. You'll see an option that's on by default to always search non-index file contents.

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Clearing this option will stop the file search feature from looking through every byte in

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the selected folder or drive, which is often the culprit of the search progress bar seeming

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to hang near the end. But it may cause you to miss some relevant results, so pick your poison.

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Now it may sound like an even better idea is to just index everything on the whole drive,

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including the file contents, but beware that this can take up a lot of system resources

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if you don't have a fast PC. And when you actually finally do go and run a search, it can take a long time for Windows

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to search through an index that large, meaning you might have more or less the same problem

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that you started with. Instead, a good approach is to selectively use the indexing options tool to select only

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folders, drives, and file contents you think you may need to find quickly in the future.

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It might be a bit of a hassle to set up, but it's better than waiting around until you're

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dead. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, hit like, hit subscribe, and hit us up in the comments section with

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your suggestions for videos that we should make in the future.