Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken.
I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be rendered totally unusable? Doesn't windows have the best engineers in the world working on it?
I also thought I broke something. Since a couple of months it is absolutely unusable. It sometimes can't even find the calculator or even VSCode which I use every day.
Search is not an operating system function. It needs read access to every file you want it to find, but other than that it's just another application.
Windows has great engineers, yes, but the problem with Windows search is not an engineering problem, it's a trade-off between different use cases and performance and compatibility and innumerable other factors. Design by committee and circumstances of history made Windows search what it is, the shortcomings aren't caused by a lack of engineers capable of building Everything or Spotlight or grep or Google or whatever your ideal file search tool looks like.
I don't use windows search but, at least in the past, it took plugins to allow it to read through any format for which a plugin is registered. Of course MS included plugins for office files. Plugins for PDFs, zip files, etc. It's been around since the mid 90s. Sad if it's not working well.
Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken.
I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be rendered totally unusable? Doesn't windows have the best engineers in the world working on it?