alt Hacker NewsI think what drives me mad is its nondeterminism.
If I hit Winkey and type a string, it should not be the case that I get different results from doing that 6 times in a row because it depends whether some background task which changes the results finishes first.
Replies
Yeah... sometimes it doesn't find anything.
Anyways, this has pitched me towards app "Everything"
I occasionally check whether after all these years MS has fixed the search... no, no surprise there.
I get that it depends on indexing service which may be buggy, etc... but I guess it is possible to prioritize/have alternate index for most important stuff like executables. This bugs me the most: there is a program, but I cannot find it. I must know to navigate my way within start menu or program files (for stuff like debugging/perf tools from Microsoft)
And given lots of comments there are on HN about Windows search, why no MS guy here silently sitting has escalated this "sentiment" to the correct ears? Oh please.
That's annoying, but I think what's worse is these:
Start typing a word, see the thing you want, finish the word, it disappears.
And
Start typing, see what you want, stop typing and hit enter, but it changed to something else between when you saw it and when you hit enter.
Yes, there have been some obvious race conditions - especially with the web results or on gnome/linux with the listing of open browser tabs.
In a similar vein the browser search bar keeps remembering things you mistype once, and if your automatism is to type "n" and then press enter to go to "news.ycombinator.com" you will end up on the wrong page over and over again, because internally it keeps a counter and ranks higher depending on number of times you have "clicked" it.
Quite annoying UX with many search bar implementations and it makes me feel like the people who design these are not actual power users of their own software.
Another thing these "search boxes" (happens on macOS/iOS also AFAIK) is that sometimes even exact matches don't match unless you're using some specific length.
So if I type "ABC" I see the right application. If I type "AB" I don't see it anymore. But if I do "A" then I see the right application. So you have to then always remember to do either "A" or "ABC", because doing "AB" shows a completely different result as the first hit.
Completely bonkers behavior, and shit like this convinced me that neither Microsoft nor Apple has actual UX professionals employed anymore, or they don't have sufficient power to actually influence how things are made.