Vista Search: Slick but Buggy

I love Vista’s search mechanism. It’s fast, tightly integrated and virtually seamless to operate. I’m particularly fond of the “Stack By” feature. It makes finding and sorting the myriad data files on my production system a breeze. Unfortunately, it’s also buggy as hell. When it works, it allows me to organize information in ways I could only dream of under Widows XP. However, when it breaks – as it did recently while researching this blog post – I find myself cursing the day its lead developer was born.

Case in point: While perusing my Clients folder I decided to use the “Stack By” option to organize the contents by timestamp. A quick click of the Date Modified column header menu and I was looking at a lovely set of search stacks with names like “Yesterday” and “Earlier This Week” (there was even one called “A Long Time Ago” – but none for “in a Galaxy Far, Far Away” – bummer).

So far, so good. I then tried to open one of the stacks, specifically, the “Earlier This Week” results set. However, instead of seeing a list of documents and other files I was presented with a set of blank white icons with no filenames and no apparent function (other than to populate the window with dummy icons). Puzzled, I tried refreshing the folder. No luck. I then tried backing-up a level and re-entering the results set. Nope. Finally, I started the whole search process over, retracing my steps through the “Stack By” selection, etc. Again, no dice.

As a final, desperate measure I sought out the Indexing Options applet in Control Panel. Manually re-indexing all indexed locations didn’t fix the problem, and a search of Google netted no advice. In the end I was forced to accept failure – and to lessen my opinion of Vista’s search capability. Oh well, maybe when Service Pack 1 arrives…