Search in Windows Vista

For the longest time, search functionality in Windows has been rather limited. In fact, I believe the plethora of search products and toolbars such as Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop Search are a direct result of this limitation. With Windows Vista, Microsoft has definitely improved search. Earlier today I came across one search improvement termed ‘natural language search’. Mike Torres has a great write up of Natural Language Search in Windows Vista but for quick summary, before I enabled natural language search, a query such as “Email to John about Scripts’ resulted in 0 search results.

Search with Natural Language Search disabled

I enabled natural language search and the same query now results with the following results:

Results with Natural Search Enabled

To enable Natural Language Search in Windows Vista:

  1. Open any folder in Windows Vista
  2. Click on Organize
  3. Click on Folder and Search Options
  4. Click on the Search tab
  5. Make sure that the box next to ‘Use natural language search’ is checked
  6. Click OK 

You can now enjoy the full power of natural language search in Windows Vista.

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