14 DAY TRIAL // The search feature has evolved a lot in Windows 10, and thanks to Bing and Cortana, it’s a lot easier to find the information you’re looking for straight from the desktop.
But as many Windows 10 users found out the hard way, the search capabilities bundled into the operating system are far from flawless and errors show up when you expect them the least.
Two such cases made the rounds the past weekend and clearly indicate that there are times when you just can’t rely on the search feature. On the other hand, it’s important to note that we couldn’t reproduce the bugs shown in the screenshots here, so if there are indeed errors hitting the search feature in Windows 10, they’re happening on specific sets of systems and not on all of them.
Failed searches
First, there’s the simple search for “Windows Store.” While Microsoft has renamed the Windows Store to Microsoft Store, typing the old name on a Windows 10 computer brings up the Store app anyway, which is a behavior that absolutely makes sense.
But as you can see in this screenshot, the Microsoft Store isn’t also the top result, with Windows Search instead pointing to an icon that is by no means relevant for the said query.
Also, the second screenshot shows that searching for specific pages in the Settings app returns no results even when generic keywords are provided. Searching for “Storage” displays a message reading “no results for storage” even though the Settings apps has a dedicated “Storage” section on the System page.
There are cases when users need to rebuild the index to have the search capabilities work properly, but errors like these come and go all the time. It’ll be interesting to see how the search feature evolves in Windows 10, but for the time being, don’t be too surprised if you’re searching for a file that you know it exists but somehow can’t find it.
