Published
- 3 min read
Making Windows Search a joy to use

Photo by Daniel Lerman on Unsplash
Create a searchable file structure
Windows Search is often held back by the messy file structure on most Windows systems. The user folder is filled with temporary files that are not relevant to the user. To avoid including these file masses, it is best to move your files to a separate partition. As an example:
- C
- Users
- Windows
- D
- Data
- Pictures
- Documents
- Projects
- Programs
This way there are only a few folders that contain all your files without any clutter (i.e. D:\Data
).
Since some programs will put files on your boot partition C and resizing it after the fact is a pain, I’d recommend allocating a generous 250GB plus the size of your RAM for it.
The extra space is needed for the hibernation file (hiberfil.sys
), that saves your memory to your boot drive (unless you disable hibernation).
It is usually the same size as your RAM (which you can check at Settings
→ System
→ Info
).
Index your files
Now we need to tell Window search which folders to search. Ideally, we just specify the folders from the previous step.
- Open Settings
- Navigate to
Privacy & security
- Click on
Searching Windows
- Select
Classic
- Click
Customize search locations
- Now choose the folders you want to include in the search (and remove anything else) Now Windows will index the selected folders.
Disable web search
Alternatives for Windows Home
The following section requires the group policy editor which is only available in Windows Pro. If you are using Windows Home, consider using the registry editor instead or switching to Windows Pro.
The web search slows Windows Search down considerably and adds often unhelpful results. To disable the web search:
- Open the group policy editor
- Press Windows key + R
- Type
gpedit.msc
- Press enter
- Navigate to
User Configuration
→Administrative Templates
→Windows Components
→File Explorer
- Find and open
Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box
- Select
Enabled
- Press
OK
Now restart your computer for the changes to take effect.
Remove the search bar
The search is available in the start menu that you can open by pressing Windows key. To search, just start typing while the start menu is open. This way you don’t need to move your mouse to search - you can even start programs or open files by pressing Enter.
If this comes naturally to you then you might want to remove the now redundant search bar from the taskbar:
- Right-click the taskbar at the bottom of your screen
- Press
Taskbar settings
- Expand
Taskbar items
- In the
Search
row selectHide