For about a year or two, windows had an amazing search from the menu that used a blazing fast index search to search files, directories, and file contents locally and almost instantaneously. It was a glorious thing.
I cannot think of a case in which a user would not need to distinguish between web search and file search (other than the convenience of a single click). I do use a unified search on my phone that includes files, apps, and contacts, and if it’s not in any of those, it will launch a web search using the query. That is more than adequate. If it were performing the web search in real time, I wouldn’t be able to easily access apps and contacts, and the results would slow and change while typing.
I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.
As for the search results, I’m not saying the user shouldn’t be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.
For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.
Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.
Part of the issue with web results is that it would generally update as you type which is just a bad fit for a general menu search. I personally don’t see a place for it. If you are searching the web, you’re going to open the browser anyway. Maybe some users would use it to navigate directly to common websites, sort of like bookmarks? I don’t know.
That’s why KDE Plasma just makes the searches shortcuts in a similar manner to the !bang feature of duckduckgo. Though it’d be nice if the used ! in the shortcuts alies by default. !ddg is just more reliable than ddg.
For about a year or two, windows had an amazing search from the menu that used a blazing fast index search to search files, directories, and file contents locally and almost instantaneously. It was a glorious thing.
I cannot think of a case in which a user would not need to distinguish between web search and file search (other than the convenience of a single click). I do use a unified search on my phone that includes files, apps, and contacts, and if it’s not in any of those, it will launch a web search using the query. That is more than adequate. If it were performing the web search in real time, I wouldn’t be able to easily access apps and contacts, and the results would slow and change while typing.
I remember that, pretty sure it was in win7 or early win10, before they crammed cortana in there and you had to start jumping through hoops to disable all the garbage they added.
As for the search results, I’m not saying the user shouldn’t be able to distinguish them; in fact the way I imagine it is that the results are grouped by category and in a user determined order of priority.
For the loading times I have nothing, that isnt really avoidable with my idea.
Perhaps with some visual trickery that fades or slides the results in over a second or two, ending on the web results. It would give the web search part time to run behind the scenes, seemingly appearing as quickly as the others.
Part of the issue with web results is that it would generally update as you type which is just a bad fit for a general menu search. I personally don’t see a place for it. If you are searching the web, you’re going to open the browser anyway. Maybe some users would use it to navigate directly to common websites, sort of like bookmarks? I don’t know.
That’s why KDE Plasma just makes the searches shortcuts in a similar manner to the !bang feature of duckduckgo. Though it’d be nice if the used
!in the shortcuts alies by default. !ddg is just more reliable than ddg.