dwilson - 10:52 am on May 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

Kaled, as a full-time software developer, I would love to have better search tools on my PC. As you said, XP botched search badly.

As for the percentage of data that is Google-searchable, it's not the raw percentage that matters so much as the percentage that I need to search. I may need to search a folder of 200 MB of code and specs for the files containing a particular string. Those 200 MB are a small percentage of my total drive space, but I need to search them well -- all those .cpp, .h, .bas, .doc, .html, .vbs, .asm, etc.

I recently tried searching for something that way using XP's search. Though I had one file containing the string open in Notepad, Search found none of them. So I tried Windows GREP. Same result.

That makes me wonder if MS somehow trips up other search software besides its own .... Is Google's search going to work or will the MS OS mess it up?