ActiveWin.com: How To Search in Windows 8

To start a search, just point your mouse pointer in the right hand bottom or top corner of Windows Desktop. This will bring up the Charm bar. Click Search. Alternatively you can press Windows + C to bring up the Charm bar or Windows key + F to bring up Search immediately.

This will bring up the Search Start Screen interface. On the right hand side, you will see some options available. This includes the Find Files list box. Below that are three main search options:

From here you can filter your search results which range from applications, settings and files. Lets try some search queries:

Files:

File search in Windows 8 is simple yet powerful, not to mention fast, just bring up the Search screen and enter your query:

Here you can see I have searched for a file with the name machine report, immediately, a set of relevant results are displayed. I can hover the file and view details about it such as its location on my hard disk and the time it was created along with the size. When you find the file you want, just click it to launch the application. That’s it.

In the above screen shot, I did a search for the Mail app. One of the interesting things about searching is, you are able to filter search according to related topics. As you can see below Apps, there is also Files related to the search query. Lets see what that is about:

You will see that Find Files brings up any data on the drive with key words relating to Mail, weather they are documents or spreadsheets. You can further filter your files specifically if they are documents. See below:

All I need to do is enter the search query and it brings up relevant results. In the above screenshot, I am actually searching my Hotmail inbox. Very quick and easy. You have a variety of areas to search from, whether it is the Windows Store, People, Maps, Music, Videos, Photos or Internet Explorer. Here is another example:

Search in Windows 8 is very powerful and convenient. It offers you just the results you need when you need it. The search by app feature is one I like most, the visual enhancements, makes finding what you need fun and easy.