With Windows 7 search has finally gotten better. It has actually gotten so good, that it gives me flashbacks to the time when I was running BeOS as my main operating system. I wrote BeOS here, cause all Microsoft has done here, is catching up with what other operating systems have done for years. MacOS X has similar functionality with it’s Spotlight. In fact, the initial version of Spotlight was made by Dominic Giampaolo, who wrote the file system for BeOS.

Advanced Query Syntax

Microsoft calls it’s solution Advanced Query Syntax (AQS). Fear not, cause it is not difficult to use at all. AQS lets you quickly define and narrow your searches for even more targeted results. Do be able to do so, AQS make use of metadata. Metadata is data about the file and it’s content. If you have done some simple web publishing from time to time, you have probably had you sysadmin reminding you to not to forget filling out the metadata. The Internet search engines make use of the metadata, and Windows Search will do it in pretty much the same way.

With Windows 7 I guess we can say that Windows Search is now totally integrated with the OS. If you are still using Windows Vista (or XP), Windows Search can be downloaded and installed.

Where is my Word document?

It’s becoming more and more of a problem. Many of use have been using computers for years, and we have now gotten ourselves both internal and external harddisks in TB sizes. And as we never throw things away, the harddisks are pretty full as well, with tons of pictures, music, videos, emails and documents.

How many of us haven’t been thinking (or screamed out loud), now where did I put that file? I wrote that document a month ago! With Office 2007 we got a new Save file panel.

Using Tags in Word

Are you using Office 2007? Good, and have you ever taken the time to add tags to the document before saving it? Shame on you! To be able to use AQS successfully, you will have to take the time to add metadata your documents. I know for myself, that I have not taken the time to do so on all of my documents, but I can promise you that, that after I started learning about the powers of AQS, I have become a lot better in adding metadata!

Searching with aqs

Now go to the Seach field in the Start menu and do a search on aqs, and within a split of a second you will see the results. It found the document(s) based on the tag(s) you have added to it. The precise AQS term for this search is tags:[aqs].

Finding Music with AQS

Explaining this metadata and AQS can be done a lot simpler with music files. Have you ever ripped a CD? Oh, you’ve rip several. Have you ever ripped a CD without Internet connection? And last question, have you bought music on iTunes Music Store (iTMS)?

When you hare ripping a CD, you are first of all compressing wav files to MP3, but you are also connecting to an Internet Service that provides you with metadata for the album you are ripping.  If you buy MP3s online, the music store will already have tagged the music that you are downloading. In general we can say that these files are rich on metadata.

The metadata container most commonly used in conjunction with audio files is ID3. It allows information such as the title, artist, album, track number, and other information about the file to be stored in the file itself.

Metadata found on Aniima song

You see from the screenshots that the search for the artists amiina brings up the same songs. The search syntax is artists:amiina, in this case I could have done album:”Kurr” and come up with the same songs. If I only wanted to listen to the song Boga, I would have used the syntax title:”Boga” (or since it’s just one word title:Boga). A search on Genre in this case would not have worked, the syntax for that is genre:electronica.

Search after music made by Amiina

Find pictures when you want them

Similar to music there excists a standard metadata container for pictures, called EXIF. But there is a big difference. A lot of the metadata is automatically added by the camera as you take the pictures, but the metadata you would use for search is not among them. These data you will in most cases have to add yourself manually.

windows-live-photo-gallery-nightphoto-helsfyr

Microsoft provides an excellent application for keeping track of your photos, Windows Live Photo Gallery. I am using it almost every day. This application devides the metadata in to two categories: Information (Date taken, Camera, Exposure, Aperture, Focal length, ISO) and Descriptive tags. Adding descriptive tags is what will make it easier for you to find back to the picture when you need it or want to show it to others. For this night photo, I added three tags: E6 (the name of the highway), Helsfyr (name of the place) and nightphoto. Through the years I can have taken lots of photos, so the tag Helsfyr alone could be useless. But what if I used combinations of tags? Using tags:[Helsfyr AND nightphoto] or tags:[Helsfyr AND E6] would most likely exclude a lot of photos.

Finding e-mails on the fly!

Outlook’s inbuilt search is painfully slow, so I often use Xobni or Windows Search to look for e-mails. Some search syntaxes you should learn at once are: to:”frankps@domain.com”, to:”Frank Paul Silye”, from:”frankps@domain.com” and from:”Frank Paul Silye”. The search result will also list attachments.

Some finale words

I hope this introduction to Advanced Query Syntax gets you started. You can read a lot more about it on Microsoft’s Windows Search pages, available syntaxes can be found under Technical Resources. I have not covered searches with operators (<, >, <=, >=, ..) and wildcards (?, *), and not much about searches with multiple criteria (AND, OR, NOT).