For the longest time, search functionality in Windows has been rather limited. In fact, I believe the plethora of search products and toolbars such as Google Desktop Search and Yahoo! Desktop Search are a direct result of this limitation. With Windows Vista, Microsoft has definitely improved search. Earlier today I came across one search improvement termed ‘natural language search’. Mike Torres has a great write up of Natural Language Search in Windows Vista but for quick summary, before I enabled natural language search, a query such as “Email to John about Scripts’ resulted in 0 search results.
I enabled natural language search and the same query now results with the following results:
To enable Natural Language Search in Windows Vista:
- Open any folder in Windows Vista
- Click on Organize
- Click on Folder and Search Options
- Click on the Search tab
- Make sure that the box next to ‘Use natural language search’ is checked
- Click OKÂ
You can now enjoy the full power of natural language search in Windows Vista.