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@dhromed said:
There is thing called "prioritizing" and "sorting results" which kind of completely solves your (real) problems with partial search.
Yes, but the search already does prioritse the things searched and sort the results and still usually ends up taking too long and returning far more matches than usually necessary so it doesn't exactly "completely solve" anything. Making it automatically do a partial search as well is simply a waste of time in the majority of searches. Personally, I think it would be better to stop the search early and have a button on the results page to search for more, possibly in multiple stages.
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@Hmmmm said:
Making it automatically do a partial search as well is simply a waste of time
@Hmmmm said:possibly in multiple stages.
Well, you could easily do that automatically, so that the term "Soft" would first quickly display Softimage XSI, and then proceed with Microsoft Office. Since the word-start search should be really, really quick (even moreso because it's indexed) it should be equally quick to determine I don't actually have Softimage installed, and switch to the secondary partial results without much of a delay. I think it's explainable to users that harder searches (like partials, I guess) take more time than simple searches, but either way the search time and result set should be manageable.
In any case, the main thing is that wildcard syntax is hard to discover, but the use case associated with it (partial searches) is a pretty good thing to be able to do. I use it all the time in Firefox's address bar, and I don't need wildcards.
Oh, here's a cool data point for ya: here on Vista, a random wildcard search I tried in the start menu takes way shorter and finds far fewer and more relevant things than the same term without a wildcard.
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@ASheridan said:
I'm a programmer, but the thought ofusing a wildcard in the search there didn't occur to me for two reasons:
Are you seriously saying you wouldn't try a few things to try to find something that would work and a * wouldn't be one of them?
@ASheridan said:
I'm not searching for files, where Windows has historically used the * wildcard
This would stop you trying it? Have you never tried using a technique in a different context?
@ASheridan said:
The Windows interface isn't meant to be designed to be useful only to programmers. A wildcard search would not typically be known by non-technical people (which you basically acknowledge by specifically pointing out that a programmer should know it)
That doesn't mean that some features of the windows interface can't have (more or less hidden) extensions that are useful to more technical people.
@ASheridan said:
You pointed out that the end result was achievable by changing the method used. So in-fact, the thing I claimed to be impossible still is impossible, you just found a workaround. It's like saying "Hey Mr, you said this car wouldn't run on diesel, but I changed the engine and now it does, so I proved you wrong". Did you technically get the car to run on diesel? Yes, maybe. Is the car the same? Probably not.
It's not like that at all. If I said you need to change the underlying search engine first and then put a * in front then you might have a point but this is more like "I've found out that if you pour some specific chemical into your car before putting in the diesel then it works fine".
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@Hmmmm said:
Are you seriously saying you wouldn't try a few things to try to find something that would work and a * wouldn't be one of them?
As I mentioned, * is typically used only as a wildcard when matching against filenames.@Hmmmm said:
This would stop you trying it? Have you never tried using a technique in a different context?
It's not that it stopped me trying it. I'm saying there was never an obvious connection between the two. The biggest names in search (Google, Bing, et al) don't require you to use a wildcard, so why the hell would it be sensible to require one in a search for a program on the Start menu?
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@Hmmmm said:
Are you seriously saying you wouldn't try a few things to try to find something that would work and a * wouldn't be one of them?
It's understandable that someone is not in the mindset to discover and learn a UI when one wants results, AndAlso the super-simple searchbox of the start menu is the last place I'd expect wildcard to work.
It's a very different story if I'm confronted with Powershell for the first time, obviously. I'd go out of my way to find references and manuals. Which I did. And now I have a healthy loathing/liking for this crazy beast.
@Hmmmm said:
That doesn't mean that some features of the windows interface can't have (more or less hidden) extensions that are useful to more technical people.
True! But as I said in my previous post, partial searches is useful for the commoner as well, and can be implemented in a sensible way.
@Hmmmm said:
@ASheridan said:
You pointed out that the end result was achievable by changing the method used. So in-fact, the thing I claimed to be impossible still is impossible, you just found a workaround. It's like saying "Hey Mr, you said this car wouldn't run on diesel, but I changed the engine and now it does, so I proved you wrong". Did you technically get the car to run on diesel? Yes, maybe. Is the car the same? Probably not.
It's not like that at all. If I said you need to change the underlying search engine first and then put a * in front then you might have a point but this is more like "I've found out that if you pour some specific chemical into your car before putting in the diesel then it works fine".
We cannot learn anything from this exchange. I'm going to make a sandwich.
When all's said and done, I actually don't think most commoners use the start search box frequently, if at all. They're all still point-and-clickers. Can't really blame 'em when I myself routinely set things up so that I can point and click.
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@Hmmmm said:
That doesn't mean that some features of the windows interface can't have (more or less hidden) extensions that are useful to more technical people.
No, but a feature like that which would be particularly useful to non-technical people, is unavailable because it requires the use of a method that is typically prevelant among only technically-savvy people@Hmmmm said:It's not like that at all. If I said you need to change the underlying search engine first and then put a * in front then you might have a point but this is more like "I've found out that if you pour some specific chemical into your car before putting in the diesel then it works fine".
Yes, yes it is. I said that Windows didn't search for partial matchesof things unless at the start of a word boundary. It doesn't, I need to use wildcards to search, which is non-intuitive and not always helpful - "now, I was sure that program was called 'SQL something-bench', but Windows isn't listing it, even when I used a wildcard and typed 'sql *bench'
You see, because Mr F.Ictional didn't recall that the full name of the program was MySQL Workbench, they wouldn't find it easily, without adding a * to every-sodding word. How on earth is that useful or intuitive?
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@dhromed said:
In any case, the main thing is that wildcard syntax is hard to discover, but the use case associated with it (partial searches) is a pretty good thing to be able to do. I use it all the time in Firefox's address bar, and I don't need wildcards.
Yes, and the delimiter policy is somewhat confusing. The earlier poster didn't mention periods as being delimiters, but the search does work on file extensions (e.g., doc, xls, etc), so it sometimes appears to the user that it doesn't care about start of word, which is another reason why it just looks broken when it doesn't find words that contain but don't start with the term.
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@MiffTheFox said:
Has anyone ever considered that the "search beginning of words" is intuitive? If I'm looking for, say, Flash, I'd start typing "Flash" into the box, not "ash" or "las" or something. And yes, typing "Fl" shows Flash, even if it's the shortcut's name is "Adobe Flash CS3 Professional". It also shows Microsoft Flight Simulator, but doesn't show Start Offline Test (from Smartmontools), which wouldn't be what I'm searching for if I type in "fl".
I think you are missing the point and greatly underestimating the importance of searching for substrings.If you are looking for something and you know exactly what you are looking for, then only searching the beginning of words is very logical and intuitive and works just fine. But what if you don't know the exact word? Or what if you are mis-remembering. "I could have sworn it was called Danceflash so I typed Dance, but nothing comes up. Oh wait, maybe it was Flashdance?"
What if you are searching for Firefox, so you type "Fox" because you are one of the many people I know who, for some bizaare reason that I still don't understand, always call it Foxfire? I just tried it (Windows 7) and searchng for "Fox" does not find Firefox. (although, strangely, it does find "x86_microsoft-windows-m..mdac-odbc-jet-fox32_31bf3856ad364e35_6.1.7600.16385.manifest")@ASheridan said:
You see, because Mr F.Ictional didn't recall that the full name of the program was MySQL Workbench, they wouldn't find it easily, without adding a * to every-sodding word. How on earth is that useful or intuitive?
Many people have CLI experience so using * is well-known. But many people have no CLI experience at all, and * is completely unknown to them. Which is just one more reason why being able to search for substrings is important.@MiffTheFox said:
But apparently Microsoft conducts no usability testing
Microsoft constantly claims they do a lot of usability testing, but it doesn't appear they actually use any of it. Or they only test on a strange subset of the general population. Have you ever met anyone who really thought the animated paper clip in Office or the animated search dog in Windows XP were good ideas? Or, how in all their alleged usability testing did they not notice that people often search for the wrong thing or don't always know exactly what they are looking for?
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@El_Heffe said:
Many people have CLI experience so using * is well-known. But many people have no CLI experience at all, and * is completely unknown to them. Which is just one more reason why being able to search for substrings is important.
I use the CLI every day and use filesystem globbing all the time. But especially given the fact that MS tries to make the CLI as unobtrusive as possible to regular users (and the start menu is about as "regular user" as a feature can get!), it was completely unexpected to find that wildcards were the secret to getting windows search to work like a normal search thing.
@El_Heffe said:
@MiffTheFox said:
But apparently Microsoft conducts no usability testing
Microsoft constantly claims they do a lot of usability testing, but it doesn't appear they actually use any of it. Or they only test on a strange subset of the general population. Have you ever met anyone who really thought the animated paper clip in Office or the animated search dog in Windows XP were good ideas? Or, how in all their alleged usability testing did they not notice that people often search for the wrong thing or don't always know exactly what they are looking for?I believe that they do a lot of usability testing. Some of it is simply gathered metrics from real world use. And I've no doubt that all of us fall into at least one minority in terms of usability across their categories. However, there's no way to do exhaustive usability testing on every feature. It's possible that they tested this wildcard search thing, but I doubt it, and if they did, I'd be extremely interested in the methodology and results.
Browsing around, I found this thread, in which someone claims that the wildcard thing doesn't work when searching file contents. Another wag notes that this must really suck for people with lots of German language content.
I wonder if this is a consequence of the way they index things? Perhaps given whatever they're doing, it's so expensive to do partial matches that they force you to make them do it. And not even for everything. /speculation
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@Hmmmm said:
Are you seriously saying you wouldn't try a few things to try to find something that would work and a * wouldn't be one of them?
And on the Windows 8 Start Screen, which apparently uses a stricter form of AQS that doesn't recognize wildcards by default, "*keyword" by itself will not work.
You need to use:
"~*keyword" (which will actually only match words ending with "keyword", when searching the Start Screen)
or
"~~keyword"/"~keyword" (which will match words with "keyword" at the start, middle or end)Can you honestly say that anyone who was not already familiar with AQS would've been able to discover/guess this?
(BTW in a previous post I wrote that tilde means "use AQS". Obviously this is wrong. The meaning of tilde in AQS is covered here, and one of the uses is to allow DOS-style wildcards (which I've found is necessary when searching the Windows 8 start screen):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb266512(v=vs.85).aspx#_keyword_use_in_local_languages
Also, perhaps searching only at the beginning of words could be seen as more intuitive and useful in most cases (I was only half-kidding about searching for "a"), but what sucks is the method for doing substring search is not discoverable, especially on the Windows 8 (and presumably 2012) start screen.
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@ASheridan said:
What about someone who installed MySQL Workbench but forgot what it was called.
In that case, Windows is doing the user a favor by making it difficult to run. Windows 8 will just display a message, "MySQL? Seriously? Get a real DBMS, kid" when you search for it.
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@El_Heffe said:
Microsoft constantly claims they do a lot of usability testing,
Yes, they claim that because it is true. I used to be on one of the many mailing lists they used to gather people for usability tests.
@El_Heffe said:
but it doesn't appear they actually use any of it.
Because the results aren't something you personally like? Seriously? That's your reason?
@El_Heffe said:
Have you ever met anyone who really thought the animated paper clip in Office or the animated search dog in Windows XP were good ideas?
Yes, several.
@El_Heffe said:
Or, how in all their alleged usability testing did they not notice that people often search for the wrong thing or don't always know exactly what they are looking for?
I'm sure they did notice it, but maybe they also noticed that doing full-text searches by default was confusing for people who were searching for the right thing (for example by returning some weird obscure Fox Pro update package). Maybe they found that people searching for the wrong thing aren't helped by full-text searches often enough so that making that the default would help the problem.
Or maybe they plain fucked up and you're right. But I wouldn't bet on that.
But the big problem here is your enormous ego. "Microsoft did something in a way I don't like, therefore they couldn't have possibly actually tested it with people!" Why? Because you're fucking God? Because all people are made in your image? Get over yourself.
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@El_Heffe said:
Have you ever met anyone who really thought the animated paper clip in Office or the animated search dog in Windows XP were good ideas?
I have met very few people who didn't think they're a good idea - and they were mostly techies. Any "normal" user I've worked with quite liked them (which is not surprising - that's who they were for).
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A tool I used to use [I stopped after Vista made it somewhat redundant] called Launchy went a step further and basically inserted a wildcard between each letter of what you typed... At the time I was playing EverQuest II, and typing "EQ" implicitly searched for "*E*Q*" which brought back what I was after. I frequently used acronyms and the results were nigh instantaneous. Omitting letters (say EvrQest) still got the thing I was looking for and eliminated everything else. It would also prioritize things I was more likely to launch to the top. I grew to trust it to the point where I felt confident enough to type "[alt+space] EQ [enter]" without even looking at the screen to know it had selected the app I wanted.
Granted this is a bit of a different use-case, but in my life it's much more frequent that I _do_ know what app I want to launch, and I want to do it with as few clicks/keystrokes as humanly possible.
Substring matches can't possibly be harder than contains-all-character matches, and Launchy did those fast.
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@blakeyrat said:
I'm sure they did notice it, but maybe they also noticed that doing full-text searches by default was confusing for people who were searching for the right thing (for example by returning some weird obscure Fox Pro update package). Maybe they found that people searching for the wrong thing aren't helped by full-text searches often enough so that making that the default would help the problem.
I doubt it would be confusing, those update packages shouldn't be in the Start menu in the first place, so wouldn't be found in a results list on full search. If they were, that would be a WTF, but not one caused by proper searching, it would be caused by improper use of the Start menu. Also, considering the fact that there's no way to enable it to be used without those * wildcards, it's highly unlikely that it was an idea Microsoft considered and discarded. Much more likely that it wasn't ever considered at all.
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That's exactly what I love about Krunner. I can launch things a lot more quickly. I recently showed my wife how to do this, because she was having problems finding apps on Linux. I told her how to use it, and now she pretty much uses only Krunner to launch apps, and not the menu, because it's actually easier to use, and she doesn't have to know what an app is called, she can just type roughly what it is she wants to do (i.e. 'write' for writing a document, or 'sheet' for a spreadsheet, 'web' for web browser, etc. She doesn't need to know it's Libre Writer, Libre Calc or Firefox/Chrome, they're the options she will get)
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@ASheridan said:
@blakeyrat said:
I'm sure they did notice it, but maybe they also noticed that doing full-text searches by default was confusing for people who were searching for the right thing (for example by returning some weird obscure Fox Pro update package). Maybe they found that people searching for the wrong thing aren't helped by full-text searches often enough so that making that the default would help the problem.
I doubt it would be confusing, those update packages shouldn't be in the Start menu in the first place, so wouldn't be found in a results list on full search. If they were, that would be a WTF, but not one caused by proper searching, it would be caused by improper use of the Start menu.Searching the start menu also searches your files by default, in Windows Vista/7/2008/2008 R2.
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@CodeSimian said:
@ASheridan said:
@blakeyrat said:
I'm sure they did notice it, but maybe they also noticed that doing full-text searches by default was confusing for people who were searching for the right thing (for example by returning some weird obscure Fox Pro update package). Maybe they found that people searching for the wrong thing aren't helped by full-text searches often enough so that making that the default would help the problem.
I doubt it would be confusing, those update packages shouldn't be in the Start menu in the first place, so wouldn't be found in a results list on full search. If they were, that would be a WTF, but not one caused by proper searching, it would be caused by improper use of the Start menu.Searching the start menu also searches your files by default, in Windows Vista/7/2008/2008 R2.
I'm fairly sure (seeing as how others have managed it) that the same search terms could be used to search different things in different ways.
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@ASheridan said:
I doubt it would be confusing, those update packages shouldn't be in the Start menu in the first place, so wouldn't be found in a results list on full search.
You know how I know you've never used Windows 7 and are talking out of your ass, you fucking piece of shit?
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@ASheridan said:
I'm fairly sure (seeing as how others have managed it) that the same search terms could be used to search different things in different ways.
Not sure what you mean here. I think the discussion was about searching the start menu and finding some obscure Fox Pro update package (for example). You said: "if that happened, it would be a WTF that those packages are in the start menu".
My point is that by default, when you type something in the start menu search box, results will be returned from:- Programs in your actual start menu
- Control panel applets
- Files in indexed locations on your hard drive
So just because the start menu search returns some obscure Fox Pro update package, doesn't mean a shortcut was literally installed somewhere in your start menu by some installer. It could've been a file in an indexed location somewhere on your hard drive. (e.g. an .EXE file that was downloaded to the Downloads folder.)
AFAIK, the only way to turn off searching files from the start menu is to right-click on the start menu, and change the relevant option in the options dialog.
I'm not defending the current behaviour either way (I think at the very least, substring search should be exposed as an option), but just pointing out the default behaviour of the start menu (search both programs and files) that you seem to have missed.
FWIW, in Windows 8/2012, Microsoft has changed this behaviour so you have to search Apps (start menu), Files, and Settings (Control Panel) separately, and not all at once.
So if you were talking about searching the Windows 8 Start Screen (which you were not), your point would be valid.
- Programs in your actual start menu
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I just called him a piece of shit, was less typing.
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@blakeyrat said:
@ASheridan said:
Lol, I'm writing this on Windows 7. Go get out your mums basement and get some fresh air.I doubt it would be confusing, those update packages shouldn't be in the Start menu in the first place, so wouldn't be found in a results list on full search.
You know how I know you've never used Windows 7 and are talking out of your ass, you fucking piece of shit?
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@CodeSimian said:
My point is that by default, when you type something in the start menu search box, results will be returned from:
@CodeSimian said:
- Programs in your actual start menu
- Control panel applets
- Files in indexed locations on your hard driveSo just because the start menu search returns some obscure Fox Pro update package, doesn't mean a shortcut was literally installed somewhere in your start menu by some installer. It could've been a file in an indexed location somewhere on your hard drive. (e.g. an .EXE file that was downloaded to the Downloads folder.)
Yes, but it wont appear in the programs list then, it'll be in one of the other lists that appear in the search results. I've not missed how they work, I'm just specifically talking about programs, hence the programs list in the search results.
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@blakeyrat said:
I just called him a piece of shit, was less typing.
And also about as useful as most of your input, well done.
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@flabdablet said:
@boomzilla said:
@blakeyrat said:The key thing here is that blakeyrat cannot conceive of anyone who has different values or experiences from him. If something doesn't fit his idea of good, or isn't useful to him, then it is obviously shit and anyone who defends it has bad motives or is just stupid. The world is black and white, and My Little Pony is a show for grown ups to watch when there are no kids around.
His comments certainly give that impression. I am interested in finding out whether there's an interesting mind behind all the sturm und drang; I suspect there is.
I just called him a piece of shit, was less typing.
Huh.
Pity.
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@ASheridan said:
As I mentioned, * is typically used only as a wildcard when matching against filenames.
You can use it for whatever you want, including text searches in Office, but I think is disabled by default.
@ASheridan said:The biggest names in search (Google, Bing, et al) don't require you to use a wildcard, so why the hell would it be sensible to require one in a search for a program on the Start menu?
I don't use Bing but Google allows the use of wildcards, Ex: "magic * land" will return results for pages that have magic + someword + land
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@ASheridan said:
Yes, but it wont appear in the programs list then, it'll be in one of the other lists that appear in the search results. I've not missed how they work, I'm just specifically talking about programs, hence the programs list in the search results.
True enough, thanks for clarifying.
