Specifications

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CHAPTER 1 Customizing Windows Explorer
Running Custom Searches
When you open a folder window, you know that you can click inside the Search box, type
some text, and you get a list of files and folders that match your text. This worked well in
Windows Vista, but it really rocks in Windows 7 because the latest version of the Desktop
Search engine is even faster. However, simple text searches aren’t going to radically boost
anyone’s productivity or help you find a file needle in a hard disk haystack. To take
searching to the next level, you need to know about two obscure but powerful search
features: Advanced Query Syntax and natural language queries.
Using Advanced Query Syntax to Search Properties
When you run a standard text search from any Search box, Windows looks for matches
not only in the filename and the file contents, but also in the file metadata: the properties
associated with each file. That’s cool and all, but what if you want to match only a
particular property. For example, if you’re searching your music collection for albums that
include the word Rock in the title, a basic search on rock will also return music where the
artist’s name includes rock and the album genre is Rock. This is not good.
FIGURE 1.7 When you install the Registry mod, you see the Take Ownership command when
you right-click a file.