Click to EnlargeSwiping
in from the right edge on a touch screen or touchpad with special
Windows 8 drivers will make the Charms menu appear on the right side of
the screen, with icons for Search, Share, Home, Devices and Settings.Windows 8's universal search function might be its best feature. By either clicking the search icon in the charms menu or simply typing when you're on the Start screen, you can query nearly anything on your device or on the web. The search application, which runs full screen in the Modern UI, consists of two panes. The larger left pane shows results while the right pane contains the free text search box and a long list of icons, representing different things you can search.
Click to EnlargeBy
default, Search queries your list of installed applications, but you
can select icons that allow you to search Microsoft's app store, the Web
via Bing, your email, your contacts or any of a dozen other Windows 8
applications. New applications can even add themselves to the search
list.Since the Start screen doesn't list any of the preloaded desktop applications by default, we found ourselves using search to get to Windows Paint or the command prompt. Strangely, applications within the Control Panel are invisible to search. When we searched for "Computer Management" or "Mouse," both sub apps under the Control Panel, we got zero results.
Overall, we found search fast and helpful, but we wish there were some advanced settings that let it dig deeper. For example, when we performed a file search for *.docx and *.jpg, Windows only found files that were in User folders. It failed to detect a JPG we put in the root of the C drive or thousands of pictures we had on another partition. We also found it annoying that the search app always defaulted to searching our apps, even if we had searched something else the previous time we used it. We also would have appreciated the ability to search more than one thing at a time (for example, files and the Web).
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