I would like to quickly "filter" certain file types or folders using Windows 7 search.
In previous Windows versions it was easy to select a folder and do a quick search for all "*.csv" files for example, this gave relatively fast results. But searching indexed contents seems to slow down a simple "filter search".
I was wondering if there was an option to temporarily disable searching the indexed contents, much like the provided search filters in Windows 7 (e.g., kind:=Folder).
Maybe this is not the purpose of the built in search functionality but being able to quickly filter files/folder/sub folder without looking at contents and not using a third party tool would be nice.
Note that I do not want to switch of indexing.
If there is another (native) way to quickly filter files or folders i would also be interested to hear about it.
The "slow-down" seems mainly related to indexing. If no indexing is going on in the background (if the index is up-to-date) the responsiveness is better. But it would be interesting to know if it is possible to do a search without using the index. The practical problem is that when some new content containing a large number of files is added to the system this is not directly fully indexed.
Best Answer
The MSDN article on Advanced Query Syntax (AQS) has a nice summary on the available filter options.
The article does not mention an option to temporarily disable the index for searches (which makes sense since the article is related to searching indexed contents).