Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

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My favourite Windows bug is the Start Menu search function.

Install Windows Server 2016 or 2019 in any manner you choose: Blank VM with ISO image, new Azure VM from Microsoft template, whatever.

Try using the Start Menu.

Nothing will work.

The search upon typing will not show all items.

If you click on a search result, it won't launch.

Type "SQL" to try and match "Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio" and be shocked to find that it doesn't. But it matches on "Management"! It's not that it didn't index it, it's just that it couldn't be bothered fully indexing it... or something.

Type "Internet" and you won't see Internet Options. Sometimes it won't show up even if you've typed "Internet Opt". You have to complete the search to "Internet Options", character-for-character to reveal that it exists.

Etc...

It blows my mind that this could be fucked up, not just once, but for every single Windows release since Vista, in similar but different ways.

For me, for the rare time I need Edge, typing 'edge' will not show me the Edge browser. It offers an internet search for that word, however if i stop at just 'edg' it will correctly suggest the Edge browser.

There are many similar examples with this same pattern.

I have had that problem with windows settings, internal programs and external programs. Wtf is wrong with windows' search?

The wildest thing to me is that on out of the box Windows 10, from its release to now, you can't type a search into the Start menu and drag a program out of the results to create a shortcut. That feels like a "copy and paste doesn't work" level mistake to me.

I've seen this on Windows 10. There are a bunch of suggestions online but none of them worked for me. I ended up re-installing to fix the problem.

I suspect that search indexing is slow and you weren't patient enough. Leave that machine a week and everything will be indexed...

No, Windows regularly changes the index order and "learns" what you commonly type and what you click for which phrase.

This leads to absurd situations where the index show different programs for each letter.

For example on my machine:

Up > Windows Update first

Upd > Lenovo System Update first

Upda > Windows Update first

Update > Lenovo System Update is the only result

When I search for Visual Studio, only a few programs are found. I made a shortcut for the Visual Studio Command prompt because Windows search regularly threw it out of the results. One day it's there, the next it's gone. Horrible UX.

But it’s /learning/. That’s a big buzzword these days

A week!?!

What planet are you from that it takes a server nearly 170 hours of processing time to index... what... a few dozen kilobytes?

And why, for the love of god why, does it have to index the Start Menu!? Why isn't it indexed synchronously on install!?

Why does it even need indexing in the first place!? Do you have any idea how few milliseconds it takes to just brute-force search through a few dozen KB of text?

I implemented real-time character-by-character completion and search for an index over a 100M records in a web application in 2007. Are you telling me that Microsoft, one of the world's biggest corporations struggles to solve the same problem in a week for an amount of text that a child could index using play cards in a matter of minutes?

You get neither bonuses nor kudos for implementing a bruteforce solution. A self-healing machine-learning AI-based n-dimensional hyperindex search sounds much better, and is the natural choice for any career-conscious programmer

With a blockchain.

My counterpoint to this is: do you realize how many new Windows machines come with such terrible hard drives that your ask would bring the machine to a near stop for hours?

This is one of those places where Microsoft has let the OEMs that install Windows on 5400rpm hard drives or slower to this day ruin the experience for others. Hence we get this weird performance detection system that tries to guess how slow your system is when it comes to search and seemingly fails miserably at all cases.

And then certain people suffering from some variant of Stockholm Syndrome wonder what other people see in so-much-more expensive Macs.

It's the fucking OS, that even with its problems (Spotlight has gone downhill on macOS too) is still a generally more pleasant experience than the other 2 options.

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